The Language Teacher Feature Article

|3

An effective way to improve

listening skills through
shadowing
Keywords
listening, shadowing, bottom-up,
TOEIC, Japanese
While improving listening comprehension skills has been one of the most
difficult areas for language teachers and
learners, shadowing has been playing a
sensational role in improving learners
listening skills in Japan in recent years.
Most studies reported the effectiveness
of short-term shadowing training in
terms of learners listening skill improvement. However, how teachers can improve the skills effectively has not been
fully examined. In order to explore a
more effective procedure for teaching
through shadowing, this study examined
the shadowing procedure as a method
of teaching listening. The research
question was to determine whether the
use of a combination of two levels of
materials for shadowing improves learners listening comprehension skills better
than materials of similar difficulty levels.
The results show that a combination of
the two different difficulties of materials
improves learners listening comprehension skills more than offering materials at
only one level of difficulty.

Yo Hamada
Akita University

istening is one of the most important but difficult areas

to teach English learners, although the role of listening
in English education is more emphasized than it was in
the previous decades in Japan. Listening sections were finally
introduced to the national center entrance examination but
introducing the listening section to the examination has yet to
produce positive results. For example, Takeuchi and Kozuka
(2010) examined how university students listening scores on
the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC)
changed from 2005 to 2008. The data do not show a major
improvement after the listening test was brought into the center
entrance examination.
Under these circumstances, the development of effective
teaching techniques for listening is highly necessary. This
decade has seen a surge in researching shadowing as an effective listening technique in Japan. Although the effectiveness
of shadowing has been affirmed, the critical limitation of past
studies is that the learners individual differences were not dealt
with. In addition, there is a widespread common understanding
that limits appropriate materials for shadowing to be at the
i-1 level (i is the current learners proficiency level, i+1 is the
slightly higher level and i-1 is the slightly lower level.) . Thus,
this paper will explore a more effective method to improve
learners listening comprehension skills as a way to deal with
individual differences and difficulties with material.

Definition of shadowing
Shadowing was originally used for training interpreters. It is
in the current decade that shadowing has captured language
instructors attention and been incorporated into teaching a
foreign language.
THE LANGUAGE TEACHER: 36.1 January / February 2012

The Language Teacher Feature Article

Lambert (1992) defined shadowing as a paced,
parrot-style auditory tracking task, conducted
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 language 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 processes 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 reinforcement of the bottom-up process appears to benefit
learners most.

Effectiveness of shadowing
The effectiveness of shadowing on improving listening comprehension skills has been examined
in classroom research. Tamai (1992) compared
shadowing with dictation in a three-month
study with 25 university students. Shadowing
was shown to improve students listening skills
faster than dictation in the short term. Tamai
(2005) observed two groups of 45 students (one
shadowing group and one dictation group) and
concluded that shadowing assists lower level
learners. He divided each group of 45 students
into three different proficiency levels. After 13
lessons, the results of the shadowing groups
showed that the low and middle groups improved significantly. Suzuki (2007) examined 112
participants to show practical and effective ways
to use shadowing in the classroom by using a
high school textbook. Onaha (2004) trained 43
university students with shadowing and dictation practice and concluded that the combination

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of the two exercises was effective in improving

learners listening comprehension skills.
Not only in EFL contexts, but also in Japanese
as a Foreign Language (JFL) contexts, a small
number of studies have been conducted with the
aim of creating a listening-based curriculum for
schools. Mochizuki (2006) studied 50 university
exchange students and reported that 49 out of
50 participants agreed on the effectiveness of
shadowing training. Toda and Lius (2007) small
study with five Korean university students suggested material for shadowing training should
be read at a natural speed and contain natural
pauses in JFL contexts.
These studies support the theory that shadowing is effective for improving bottom-up
processes in listening, leading to acquiring more
successful listening comprehension skills. Furthermore, learners appear to improve prosody,
gain more concentration, and become used to
natural speed as well (Takizawa, 2002). Thus,
learners are able to receive a variety of benefits
and listening improvements from shadowing.

Varieties of shadowing usage

A variety of shadowing usages have been
reported in language teaching contexts. For
example, Murphey (2001), Kadota and Tamai
(2005), and Takizawa (2002) describe the varieties in ESL/EFL teaching contexts (Tables 1,
2, and 3). Kurata (2007) shows how she used
shadowing techniques in JFL contexts (Table 4).
How shadowing is used varies from researcher
to researcher and there are no unified sets for
shadowing training.
There are a few points to note to use shadowing for listening comprehension improvement.
First, regarding English acquisition, producing output in Japanese is not recommended
(Shizuka, 2001), although some of the activities
mentioned above involve translation. Hamada
(2011a) warns that some learners believe that
they should translate everything they hear
instantly, which results in decreasing self-efficacy
through translation failures. Second, to improve
learners listening comprehension skills, practicing shadowing along with other activities such
as reading silently and simply listening is recommended. Shiki et al., (2010) report that practicing
only with shadowing hits a ceiling after four

Hamada: An effective way to improve listening skills through shadowing

Table 1. Murphey (2001)

Table 4. Kurata (2007)

Procedure

Procedure

Types

Procedure

Complete
shadowing
Selective
shadowing
Interactive
shadowing

Listeners shadow everything speakers say.

Listeners select only certain words
and phrases to shadow.
Selective shadowing + listeners add
questions and comments from the
listener into the conversation to
make it more natural.

Full shadowing

Listens to input then tries to repeat

the auditory input as soon as it is
heard.
The speaker purposely delivers
their speech with pauses between
phrases to give the shadower more
time to recognize the words.
Full shadowing done in the head,
sub-vocalization.
The shadower picks up the last
word or the stressed words and
just shadows these.
The shadower adds their own
comment.

Table 2. Kadota and Tamai (2005)

Procedure

Procedure

Mumbling

Listeners shadow by focusing not on

their own pronunciation but on the
incoming sounds they are listen to.
Synchronized Listeners shadow the audio, reading
reading
aloud the script, simulating every
sound and intonation.
Prosody
Listeners try to shadow as they do in
shadowing
the synchronized reading without a
script.
Content
Listeners shadow as well as focus on
shadowing
the contents of the speech.

Table 3. Takizawa (2002)

Procedure

Details

Listen to the
audio

Dont read the text but only listen

Translation

Translating slash by slash

Read by slashing, comprehending

Slash reading
by chunks and check unknown
words
Practice repeatedly till reproducing
Full shadowing
70% to 80%.
Repeating and Repeating with the text and
shadowing
shadowing after that
Repeating
(reproduction)
Translation
Delayed
shadowing
Contents
shadowing
Translating
while listening

Repeating, pause by pause

Translate, pause by pause
Shadow, delaying by 3 or 4 words
Shadowing, thinking about the
meanings
Listening and translating simultaneously

Slash
shadowing
Silent
shadowing
Part shadowing
Part shadowing
+ comment
Part shadowing
+ question

The shadower adds a question.

or five times, which means that relying solely

on shadowing would not best assist a learners
improvement.
As a practical report, Hamada (2011a, 2011b)
followed the instructions recommended in
Kadota and Tamai (2005) and showed that
the procedure effectively improved learners
listening comprehension skills as follows. The
procedure is the basic instruction to be used in
this study.

Problems and research question

The previously conducted research has shown

the effectiveness of shadowing on improving
learners listening comprehension skills but
some problems do exist. First, there is a widely
accepted principle that materials designated as
i-1 or below are considered to be appropriate for
shadowing (Kadota & Tamai, 2005), and difficult
materials at i+1 are not recommended. According to Kadota (2007), shadowing materials
should ideally contain no more than two or three
unknown words per 100 words. However, limiting the materials to only the easy ones would
take away teachers opportunities to use the
shadowing technique because in actuality more
challenging materials are used in classrooms. No
study has reported with empirical data that difficult materials are ineffective to improve learners
listening comprehension skills. Second, limiting
the materials to solely easy or difficult ones does
not account for individual learners differences.
THE LANGUAGE TEACHER: 36.1 January / February 2012

The Language Teacher Feature Article

For example, a textbook that is easy for one
student could be difficult for another student, or
vice versa. Also, a supposedly easy textbook can
be too easy for some students. Thus, a procedure
to incorporate different levels of materials into
the practice should be explored.
Third, the practicality of shadowing must be
examined. While several methods of shadowing
use have been introduced, no clear and effective
sets or patterns have been provided. No studies
have explored or compared which methods
would be more effective for different purposes.
Thus, finding an effective set of procedures is
necessary for language teachers in classrooms.
To develop a methodology to make shadowing a
more effective technique, this paper aims to pursue
the following questions: Will using materials of
a combination of two levels of difficulty improve
learners listening comprehension skills more than
using materials of similar difficulty levels?

Method
Participants
Fifty-nine (37 male, 22 female) Japanese national
university freshmen, majoring in education,
nursing, and engineering participated in this
experiment. In April, all the freshmen took a
placement test and they were divided into three
levels (basic, intermediate, and advanced). The
participants belonged to one of the highest of the
intermediate classes. The participants were divided into an experimental group (M11, F18) and
a control group (M26, F4). The listening comprehension skills for the groups did not differ (t (57)
= 1.02, ns), nor did the listening self-efficacy (t
(57) = 1.92, ns) The mean listening score on the
pre-test was 5.59 for the experimental group and
6.13 for the control group, out of a maximum of
13. Thus, the two groups are considered to be
equally balanced.
In every lesson, the control group practiced
shadowing by using materials of similar dif-

ficulty levels; the experimental group practiced

by using less challenging and more challenging
materials alternately (Day 1, 3, 5, 7: Less Challenging materials; Day 2, 4, 6, 8: Challenging
ones). Since the focus is combining two levels
of materials, more challenging in this context
means the materials are more difficult than the
other set of materials.

Materials

The TOEIC test new official book (2009) was chosen

for this study. This textbook was considered
appropriate for the following two reasons. First,
since the primary focus of this experiment is
the difficulty level, creating the test items in the
same way as the official TOEIC test maintained
reliability. Second, since the learners came from
different departments and majors, the TOEIC
textbook was considered to attract more learners
than other specialized materials which would be
interesting for a limited number of learners.
The difficulty of the texts used in the training was measured from two perspectives:
Psychological resource and readability. As the
number of the sentences increases, learners need
more psychological resource for its process and
storage (Osaka, 2010), which makes listening to
the passage more difficult. Though the concept
of psychological resource is famous for reading
span tests (Daneman & Capenter, 1980), the same
should apply to listening processes because both
listening and reading share the same process in
this respect. In addition, a readability index, the
Flesh-Kincaid grade, was used. While several
readability formulae have been developed, the
Flesh-Kincaid index is often used to measure
the reliability of English examinations in Japan,
e.g., research on the national center examination
(Chujo & Hasegawa, 2004), and easily calculated
using Microsoft Word. The Flesh-Kincaid is
designed to index for which grade the passage is
appropriate, based on schools in the U.S (Microsoft, 2011). While the data of both odd and even
numbers of the control group are close, those of

Table 5. Materials used in the lessons

Group
Times
Odd (1, 3, 5, 7)

Even (2, 4, 6, 8)

Experimental group

Control group

Word average

Flesh-Kincaid average

Word Average

Flesh-Kincaid average

78

3.9

78.5

4.2

105

4.7

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74.5

4.6

Hamada: An effective way to improve listening skills through shadowing

the control group differ (Table 5), which means
the control group used the same level of materials and the experimental group used a different
level of difficulties alternately.
To assess the improvement of listening comprehension skills, the collection of sample listening
questions that consists of 13 questions from the
TOEIC test new official book (2008) was used for
pre-and post-tests. The same test was used for its
reliability because of the following two reasons.
First, the difficulty of the collection of sample
listening questions on the TOEIC (2008) and those
of TOEIC (2009) differed statistically in the pilot
study. Second, there was approximately one month
between the pre- and post- tests, and because no
explanation about the content of the tests was
given to the learners after the pre-test. The details
of each section are described in Table 6.

Table 6. Learners tasks in each part

(TOEIC, 2009)
Section

Procedure

Part 1

Learners hear four statements about

a picture and select the one statement
that best describes in the picture from
four choices. Neither the statements
nor choices are given to the learners.

Part 2

Learners hear a question or statement and three responses and select

the best response to the question
or statement. Neither a question or
statement or choices are given to the
learners.

(2 questions)

(5 questions)

Part 3

(3 questions)

Part 4

(3 questions)

Learners hear some conversations between two people and answer three
questions about what the speakers
say in each conversation, and select
the best response to each question
from four choices. The conversations
are not printed but the question and
the choices are given to the learners
Learners hear some talks given by a
single speaker to answer three questions about what the speaker says
in each talk, and to select the best
response to each question from four
choices. The talks are not printed
but the questions and the choices are
given to the learners. In each part,
learners can hear each talk only once.

Procedure
A total of eight shadowing training sessions
were conducted. Since the listening section of
the TOEIC consists of 4 parts, Day 1 and 2 were
assigned for Part 1, Day 3 and 4 for Part 2, Day 5
and 6 for Part 3, and Day 7 and 8 for Part 4.
The steps were revised based on the instructions recommended in Kadota and Tamai (2005)
and shown in Table 7.

Table 7. Procedure of every lesson

Step

Procedure

1. Dictation
cloze
2. Mumbling

Fill in the blanks of written scripts.

6. Check
details

Check with the written texts for

three minutes for sounds one could
not hear or shadow, and meanings
one could not understand.
Concentrate on both shadowing
and interpreting the meaning of the
passage
Dictation cloze (same as step 1).

Silently shadow the incoming

sounds without texts.
3. Parallel
Shadow while reading the text of the
reading
passage.
4. Check
Check with the texts written both
understanding in English and Japanese for three
minutes.
5. Shadowing Shadow three times.

7. Content
shadowing
8. Dictation
cloze
9. Check
answers of
dictation

Check the answers for steps 1 and 8.

There are three important points to be addressed in this procedure. First, these eight steps
include two steps (4 and 6) in which comprehension checks are conducted by reading alone
as well as purely shadowing. This is because
practice using only shadowing hits a ceiling
(Shiki et al., 2010), and training that relies solely
on shadowing was not considered to be the best
way to assist learners improvement. Second,
step 8 was set to check how much they have
improved from the first time (step 1) and was
thus a self-comparison step. Third, in steps 1 and
8, the learners tried the dictation cloze. In order
to provide learners with repeated success and
THE LANGUAGE TEACHER: 36.1 January / February 2012

The Language Teacher Feature Article

personal accomplishments, which are considered
to improve self-efficacy (Bandura, 1993), tasks
by which learners can check their progress
were incorporated. The learners were not given
a chance to check the answers from step 1 in
order to avoid focusing only on the words in the
blanks.
Before starting the training, the pre-test was
conducted. After all the training lessons, the
post-test was conducted.

Analysis
To measure which group improved more, an
analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted for the results of the listening pre- and
post-tests with pre-test being a covariate.

Results

The descriptive statistics for both groups, as

seen in Table 8, show that the mean scores of
both groups improved and that the experimental group appeared to improve more than
the control group. The descriptive statistics of
material difficulty, as seen in Table 5, show that
the experimental group used different difficulties
of materials alternately, while the control group
used materials of similar difficulty levels each
time.
The ANCOVA results show a significant differences between the two experimental and control
groups test results (F(1,56) = 6.86, p = .01). This
means that the group with the combination of
two levels of difficulty improved more than the
other group.

Table 8. Descriptive statistics of listening tests

of the experimental and control groups
Material

Pre-test of the
experimental group
Post-test of the
experimental group
Pre-test of the
control group

Post-test of the
control group

Mean

SD

Min

Max

5.59

1.92

10

7.83

1.49

10

6.13

2.18

12

6.90

1.86

10

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Discussion
Effect of the combinations of different
difficulties of materials
The finding of this study is that learners listening comprehension skills improved more when
combining different difficulties of learning
materials alternately. At least four reasons are
considered for this result. First, a combination of
the two levels can deal with individual differences
of listening proficiencies. Even though the class is
grouped into a basic, intermediate, or advanced
level, the listening ability of each learner varies in
each class. Sticking to materials at a certain level
can be too easy for one student but too difficult
for another. In fact, the post-test scores for only
three students decreased in the experimental
group but those of nine did in the control group.
One of the three students in the experimental
group commented that sounds came to him more
clearly even though his score decreased.
Second, the combination can have a positive
influence on learners psychology, especially
on anxiety. As discussed in Gass and Selinker
(2008), anxiety can be positive and negative
low levels help, whereas high levels hurt (p.
400). The learners naturally felt practicing with a
challenging material difficult; they naturally felt
practicing with a less challenging material easier
in the next lesson. Thus, even if learners could
not perform as successfully as they expected
with challenging material, they knew they
could perform at least better in the next lesson
with less challenging material, which could
provide the learners with relief. Practicing with
only materials of similar difficulty levels does
not provide the learners with this challenging
and relieving opportunity. Optimistically, this
comparatively successful experience with a less
challenging material could help learners gain
self-efficacy, a strong influential factor on motivation (Bandura, 1993).
Third, lending support from research on
psychology, the theory of attribution retraining
treatment can explain the result. Dweck (1975)
conducted experiments, in which success was
ensured in one group, and failure and success
were ensured in the other group. The latter
group outperformed the former group. Applying this theory to the current shadowing
experiment, the learners eventually managed to

Hamada: An effective way to improve listening skills through shadowing

handle failure, through training with two levels
of textbooks. They consequently improved their
overall listening comprehension skills.
Fourth, borrowing from Krashens (1985)
second language acquisition (SLA) theory and
Kadota and Tamais (2005) theory on shadowing,
the less challenging materials are possibly at
i-1 level because the materials used were easily
comprehensible. The more challenging materials
are presumably at i+1 level because the materials
used were within reach of the learners. From the
point of SLA theory, tasks should be challenging
but attainable, while recommended shadowing
materials should be less challenging so that
learners can focus on phonology tentatively. The
materials used in this experiment appear to meet
both conditions. However, this interpretation
needs further study. Factors that make listening difficult or easy vary and determining the
difficulty is quite challenging. Additionally, this
study cannot tell whether the materials were
challenging or less challenging for the learners.
Krashens i+1 theory lacks in empirical data as
well. Thus, several studies should be conducted
to verify this inference.

Limitations of this study

There are three limitations to be further investigated. First, this study did not investigate
whether either challenging or less challenging
materials for the learners were more effective or
not, but explored the effectiveness of combining
materials of different difficulty levels. Although
the length and Flesh-Kincaid index indicate the
difficulties of the materials, other factors such
as vocabulary and speakers accents should be
also taken into account. Second, as Iwashita
(2008) points out, most studies did not examine
the pure effectiveness of shadowing but that of
instructions collaborated with shadowing, this
claim is true of the current study. More research
that focuses on the pure effectiveness of shadowing will also benefit advancement of practicality
of shadowing in classrooms. Third, although
the data show that a combination of different
difficulties of materials benefits more learners,
the theoretical support for this result should be
further investigated.

Conclusion
The data gathered in this study show that learners can improve their listening comprehension
skills more quickly when using a combination
of different difficulties of materials. Since not
all learners possess high motivation and high
proficiencies, improvement of their listening
skills in a short period should be encouraging
and motivating for the learners. Although factors
such as learners motivation and interests could
also affect the results, this research is of value in
finding a way to use shadowing while addressing individuality is also valuable for classroom
teaching.
In terms of practical implications, in order to
avoid learners confusion or misunderstanding
learner beliefs, instructors need to inform the
learners of the brief theoretical background of
shadowing. Since shadowing requires learners to fully activate cognitive processes in the
brain, learners understanding and motivation
are necessary. The function and benefits of
shadowing should be taught as well. I hope this
study can provide new insights into research on
shadowing, and that more students will be able
to maximize the benefits of shadowing.

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Yo Hamada is an assistant professor at Akita
University. His current research interests include
listening, strategy training, and demotivation.