Improving the students' listening skills through shadowing

listening skills through shadowing

definition of shadowing

Shadowing was originally used for training interpreters. It is in the current decade thatshadowing has captured language  instructors’ attention and been incorporated into teaching a foreign language

Lambert (1992) defined shadowing as a paced,  parrot-style auditory tracking task, conducte with headphones. Rather than a passive activity,  however, shadowing is an active and highly cognitive activity in which learners track the heard speech and vocalize it as clearly as possible while simultaneously listening (Tamai, 1997). This process of repeating incoming speech and monitoring the shadowed material engages many areas of the learners’ brains, especially the lan-guage centers (Kadota, 2007).

According to Shiki et al., (2010), shadowing is the on-line immediate process of repeating speech, while repeating is an off-line task because it provides learners with silent pauses to reproduce the sounds. Shadowing benefits students’ listening pro-cesses as follows: The bottom-up processing at the micro level is activated, and this bottom-up processing helps more information to be passed on for macro-level analysis, thereby activating top-down processing (Tamai, 1992). Then, echoic memory, “which stores the information one hears for a short period” (Kadota, 2007, p. 255), is activated to retain incoming sound information more accurately. Learners can spend more time analyzing incoming information. This reinforce-ment of the bottom-up process appears to benefit learners most.

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