Shadowing Effects on Listening Comprehension

Throughout the realm of second language acquisition, several studies in the past decade have conducted and shown the effectiveness of shadowing on listening comprehension.

In Taiwan, an experimental study was conducted by Lin (2009) exploring twenty-five eighth graders. Students in her class received shadowing instruction and were asked to complete shadowing tasks lasting for five weeks, fifteen hours in total. Judging the results from the pre- and post-test as well as questionnaires, she reported that shadowing not only improved students’ listening and speaking skills, but also developed student’

interests and self-confidence in listening and speaking English. In her conclusion, there is little doubt shadowing is an effective learning technique.

In Japan, a series of studies related to shadowing effect was performed by Hamada (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015). In 2009, he first investigated the effect of shadowing with different levels of passages on English listening proficiency. 45 Japanese EFL high school students (23 males and 22 females) participated and were divided into two groups. Group A consisted of 22 second-year students and used 13 less challenging passages. Group B were made up of 23 third-year students and used more challenging passages. The average English proficiency level of both groups was equal. There were 13 experimental lessons in total, each lasting 50 minutes with 20-25 minutes for shadowing training. The results showed a statistically significant improvement in the lower proficiency students of Group A. On the contrary, higher proficiency students of both groups and lower proficiency students in Group B showed indistinct difference.

He concluded that shadowing training benefited more for less proficient learners and the texts used in training should be less challenging for learners.

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Concerning the fact that easier texts exclude most authentic materials, Hamada (2011) further carried out two experiments to probe whether slightly challenging materials at i+1 level could be used effectively and in what way were they effective.

According to Krashen (1985), i refers to “our current level of competence” and i+1 means “structures that are a bit beyond our current level of competence” (Krashen, 1985, p.2). 44 Japanese high school freshmen divided into two groups were investigated in the first experiment. Both groups with similar proficiency were given thirteen 50-minute lessons. The same high school textbook was used and considered a bit challenging for both groups. The only difference was that Group B didn’t receive any shadowing training during the lessons. The pre- and post-test revealed that Group A showed statistically significant improvement on short passage listening skill. The second experiment tested whether challenging authentic materials were of similar benefit to 29 Japanese high school third-grade students. The participants appeared to have made progress on their short passage listening skill only. He then concluded that shadowing with slightly challenging materials is able to develop learners’ listening comprehension as well.

In order to address the problem of individual differences, Hamada (2012) continued to explore the effect of using a combination of different levels of materials at the same time. The participants were 59 Japanese national university EFL freshmen divided into two groups with three levels (basic, intermediate, and advanced). The experimental group alternately used different levels of materials, while the control group only used materials of the same level. Although the mean scores of both groups increased in the post-test, the experimental group showed statistically significant improvement in the post-test. It was concluded that a combination of difficult and easy materials was recommended, improving learners’ listening comprehension skills more effectively.

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Recently, although the effectiveness of shadowing on listening comprehension skills had been commonly accepted, Hamada (2015) pondered whether the improvement resulted from the enhancement of learners’ phoneme perception and whether it was effective for lower-proficiency learners only. He investigated 43 Japanese national university EFL freshmen divided into low-proficiency and intermediate group based on their pre-test listening results. In pre- and post-test, a dictation cloze test of function words was used for examining phoneme perception. For the improvement of listening comprehension skills, two levels (high school and university) of listening tests were selected. A total of nine lessons were conducted using EFL textbook, each lesson followed by 15-20 minutes of shadowing training. The results revealed that the shadowing training was effective for improving phoneme perception skills regardless of listening proficiency level. On the contrary, neither group showed improvement for advanced listening skills. For basic listening comprehension skills, however, it was only effective for proficiency learners. Moreover, low-proficiency learners were capable of reaching intermediate level within a short time with the help of shadowing training. Accordingly, shadowing is especially of benefit in terms of bottom-up processing in listening. It was also suggested that shadowing should be used particularly when the target language possesses different phonological rules from the mother tongue of the learners.

Sumarsih (2017) conducted an experimental research to describe the impact of shadowing technique on learners’ listening skills. In total of 60 university students from English Department in Indonesia participated and were divided into control and experimental groups. Each group comprised 30 students. During the four-week experiment, the experimental group was taught to use shadowing technique both in and outside the class, while the control group had no such practice. The results showed the experimental group transcended the control group. Sumarsih (2017) drew the

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conclusion that the systematic and contextual feature of shadowing was recommended for improving learners’ listening skills, especially to EFL learners from countries like Japan, China, and Indonesia, and etc.

Taki and Esmaeili (2017) probed the shadowing effects on 38 Iranian EFL learners’

listening comprehension, listening self-efficacy, and the use of metacognitive listening strategies. All the participants, aged 16 averagely, were of intermediate level and randomly divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group had an exposure to shadowing practice in English listening classes while the control group had listening activities only. It was concluded by Taki and Esmaeili (2017) that shadowing is a suitable and effective teaching technique in EFL classrooms due to its significantly positive impact on both learners listening comprehension and the use of metacognitive listening strategies.

Guided by recommendations from related studies mentioned above, the researcher of the present study holds a strong belief that shadowing practice has a good chance to improve her students’ listening comprehension ability.

2.2. Mobile-assisted Language Learning (MALL)