Sometimes students ask me what Shadowing is and I like to give a simple answer. My answer is: Shadowing is repeating what you hear at the same time you hear it. You have to listen to some speaking. Repeat everything you hear, or as much as you can, without delay.
At this point many students are satisfied, but a few keep on asking. Typically, they ask, what does Shadowing do for you?
Now, I get a bit more detailed in my answer. Shadowing helps you in at least four different ways:
1) help you hear the sounds
2) help you memorize English
3) help you build fluency
4) helps build procedural knowledge of English
If you are listening to English, sometimes you can’t make out what was said. The sounds of English are different from other languages. You need to practise listening to the sounds and learning the patterns of sound in English. But just playing English radio or TV in the background is not going to help you here. Your brain hears that as background noise.
You need to focus your attention on the sounds you are listening to. Shadowing makes you focus your attention on what you listen to. That’s because if you don’t pay attention, you cannot repeat the sounds yourself.
So your big target is hearing and saying. You don’t have to think about the meaning though. Of course, you may think about the meaning of what you are listening to, but then it becomes much more difficult to shadow.
Shadowing also helps you memorize English. If you want to learn a new word, to use in conversation, shadow it being used in a short story. Then you will remember the patterns. For instance, the verb ‘put’ is frequently followed by a noun (not by a word like ‘in’ or ‘on’.. a common mistake). Shadowing will help you to recognize these patterns and use them later.
Shadowing also helps you to build your fluency. Words in written English don’t touch each other. There is a space between them. But spoken English words touch each other all the time; they play with each other, and change each other.
One example is ‘he’. You can hear the ‘h’ in this word if it is at the beginning of the sentence. But if it comes after another word, the ‘h’ often disappears. Think of this the next time you hear someone ask, “Is he going to…” (it may sound closer to “Izzy going to…?”).
As you shadow, you are copying the speaker who speaks like this (always shadow native, or native like speakers to gain a natural pronunciation). This means you have to be careful of who you shadow. If you shadow a person with an American accent a lot, you will start to have an American accent. This is true also if you shadow a person with a British accent. You can choose what kind of accent, and even what vocabulary you will have when you choose a person to shadow.
I mentioned that you can not only choose your accent, but also your vocabulary. This means you can ‘pick up’ vocabulary by Shadowing. but you can also pick up grammar. A recent scientific study suggests that grammar may be stored in procedural memory. This means that lots of repetition helps us learn the grammar, and use it without thinking about it. Shadowing does just that.
Using Shadowing can help us to learn a useable grammar. Then speaking and listening is much easier. For some people, this may not be very helpful, because practical knowledge may not help on some kinds of tests. But for most students, just speaking and listening better may be all we need.
What is hard about Shadowing?
Shadowing looks like a great study tool. Studying without having to think sounds wonderful. The problem is, many of us like to think. Or at least, we like to understand. When you are Shadowing something that you don’t understand, you may feel irritated or discontent. You may feel that if you don’t understand, then you are not learning.
This is not true, but you may feel it, and that can affect your motivation. So the hardest part of Shadowing is continuing even when you feel you don’t understand it. Even if you do not understand what you are Shadowing, your listening skill is increasing. And you are building a procedural memory knowledge of grammar. That means you should keep going.
What is easy about Shadowing?
Well, if it feels like you are not learning, what is the good point about Shadowing? It is simple. You do have to listen hard, and speak, but you don’t have to understand difficult English. You can do it for short periods of one to five minutes at a time, and then take a break. This makes Shadowing easy to do for almost anyone.
Can I do Shadowing alone?
You need to shadow speech, so that means you need to shadow with someone else, right? Wrong. You can easily shadow a recording, and that makes Shadowing very versatile. You can record just about any talking and shadow it. You can find many recordings on the internet and use them for Shadowing. There is lots of material to use for Shadowing practise. And you can do it alone, so you do not need to set a special schedule.
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