Does shadowing improve listening?

[Cainntear]

Shadowing is one of those techniques that the definition varies wildly from person to person. One person's shadowing is another person's chorusing, etc. In this case I'm using the Arguelles [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=130bOvRpt24[/youtube] definition. It's the thing most people point to when recommending it as practice.

Fair enough -- it's his term, it's his thing (as far as I know!) I'll try to use a descriptive term rather than just saying "shadowing" in future.

[Edit for correction: retracted -- see ryanheise's post a few spots down. I'll just avoid the term altogether.]

[Cainntear]

Does approximating what you think you hear (or how we think we hear) as an utterance really have any effect upon recognition of new instances?
...
A fair number of people completely fool themselves into believing they have reproduced what they hear. I'd worry about marrying up in my mind the successful recognition of meaning with a substandard reproduction. And it then having a negative effect for the latter.

This is a very good point, very clearly put.

Beginners can't be sure they're repeating correctly, because if you can't hear the sound, you won't know you're doing it wrong. I think that's kind of my point about holding off until later. When I started parroting films, I could perceive the sounds well enough that it was useful.

But I can't be the only one who's been in a language class where a teacher tries to correct a student's pronunciation by going "listen: fonction... fonction" and then gets the student stating exasperatedly "but that's what I said!!"
And if a learner can't hear deliberate correction from a teacher right in front of them, I doubt they'll be able to notice a difference when they aren't even told they're saying it wrong in the first place.

[Kraut]

Shadowing Technique in English: are you wasting your time?
https://hadarshemesh.com/magazine/shadowing-in-english/

She sees "shadowing" as a consecutive practice and does her own shadowing accordingly. She also seems uncomfortable with this term and calls it " echoing".

There are two ways you can go about shadowing:

1. Listen to an audio or video recording and echo the speaker without pausing. This option is great if you’re on the go but still want some practice time.

2. Listen to an audio or video recording, pause after each line or a certain chunk of words, and echo the speaker. And then move to the next line. This option is perfect if you have time to go deeper into the speech

.

[lingohot]

Shadowing as a technique for "budding and the experienced simultaneous interpreter(s)":

https://www.guichotdefortis.com/blog/guide-to-shadowing

Shadowing is listening to a live or recorded speaker, and repeating word for word - and often intonation for intonation - what the speaker is saying. It can be almost anything, depending on your goal:

official speeches by good speakers - to learn the turns of phrase and the delivery style

news programs - to practice your enunciation and speed

audible plays - to learn how to express emotion in your active languages

documentaries - to learn how to present engagingly, and something about the topic!

language learning texts - to learn accent and pronunciation

poetry - to learn to replicate the cadence of the language

…

[Kraut]

Here is the key sentence: "Shadowing as a technique for "budding and the experienced simultaneous interpreter(s)"
No beginner nor intermediate learner can/should do this, the good practice for them is described above and better called "echoing".

[ryanheise]

Here is a relatively short journal article giving a brief summary of the literature on shadowing as it relates to listening:

Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?

The article differentiates between "shadowing" (which is done simultaneously with little lag) and "repeating" (which is done chunk by chunk). It suggests that because shadowing is simultaneous, it has the effect of the learner focusing their attention more on the phonological aspects rather than the meaning, because for an L2 learner, this exercise of simultaneously perceiving and producing the sound leaves little cognitive resources left to pay attention to the meaning.

The article also gives a brief history of shadowing:

The idea of shadowing dates back to Cherry’s study (1953). In his experiment on speech recognition, the participants listened to two different passages. To confirm that they were listening to only one of the passages, they were asked to repeat simultaneously what they attended to, which is shadowing. Later, to learn how to listen and speak simultaneously, shadowing was used as a technique for training simultaneous interpreters. Prior to the advanced stage of translating one language into another, shadowing has been used for beginner translators to practise listening to one language and repeating it simultaneously (Lambert, 1992). Shadowing was then used for listening practice in teaching because shadowing involves listening to and repeating the input.

[Cainntear]

Here is the key sentence: "Shadowing as a technique for "budding and the experienced simultaneous interpreter(s)"
No beginner nor intermediate learner can/should do this, the good practice for them is described above and better called "echoing".

I'm not sure why you've highlighted "experienced" rather then "interpreters", and why you haven't highlighted "budding".

It's really unnatural to say the exact same thing as someone else, as we do tend to drop any redundant information from our speech.
compare
A: "What's your name?"
B: "John Smith.
with
A: "Who are you?"
B: "My name's John Smith."
This is an invented example, but indicative of the standard pattern.

Anyhow, overcoming the tendency to not repeat is something that needs training to accomplish, so I can see the point of this exercise for interpreters -- actually literally echoing words will make it much easier to notice when you don't, whereas if you're doing live interpretation on your own, you might miss something without realising.

Also, I reckon the word "shadowing" makes a lot more sense in simultaneous interpretation, really.

For the benefit of non-natives, you tend to talk about "shadowing" people at work when you follow them around and passively observe them to learn what the job entails. Well, you'll probably ask questions, but you won't be actively working. The word "shadowing" seems appropriate for an interpreter, as the interpreter should be thought of as a passive conduit, and not active in the conversation. Which is a heck of a lot of work, really.

[Cainntear]

Here is a relatively short journal article giving a brief summary of the literature on shadowing as it relates to listening:

Shadowing: What is It? How to Use It. Where Will It Go?

Interesting...

I note the following from the abstract:

Twenty-five years have passed since a teaching technique, called shadowing, was introduced in Japanese EFL contexts. Recently, this technique has gradually been recognized around the world.

Is it reasonable to assume that the biggest contributor to the growth has been the overlap between the English teaching world and the online language community...? I mean, Argüelles pushed it hard, then a bunch of self-help types included distorted versions of Argüelles's model in their "how to learn a language" advice...

[lingohot]

No beginner nor intermediate learner can/should do this, the good practice for them is described above and better called "echoing".

That's what I think as well. Or echoing first and then shadowing the same recording when you master it. Argüelles recommends 'blind shadowing' first where you just parrot the sounds you hear. I don't see the point, to be honest, apart from 'becoming curious'.

[Iversen]

I personally have a construction in my head that downgrades listening to 'just being alert to interruptions' while I am speaking myself. So essentially I don't really understand how people can shadow in the version where they just reproduce what they hear (or think they hear) while they hear it. In contrast, I can see the point in echoing where you repeat after you have listened, and even more in the version where you also study the low level sound system of the target language so that you know what you can expect to hear.

That being said, I am fairly confident that the phoneme set of a language can be reliably determined - though with caveats such as the loss of nasalized oe in some French dialects. I do not trust the advice given about allophones in the books at all. Way back in the HTLAL days I let several different sampled voices read a passage from a Dutch homepage aloud, and then I wrote down exactly how the voices pronounced the diphtongs. And point one: they did not pronounce them the same way, 2) they didn't pronounce them as my books said they should. When we come down to the allophone level you just have to listen - but if you know something about phonology you may stand a better chance of analyzing the sounds correctly. And then my question is: how on Earth can you do that while you are babbling happily along yourself ??

So I would prefer echoing (one sentence max. in one go), and I would also want to know something about the speaker. The ideal thing would have to have each sentence spoken by different speakers with different backgrounds so that you can find out what the possible gamut is. The only other alternative would be to listen exclusively to one speaker, and then try to absorb the language as she or he renders it. I suppose that many teachers would favour this last strategy, but when it comes to support for listening the first strategy might be better because you become more diversity tolerant.

PS: it just occurs to me that there is one compromise that might work, namely the one where an authority figure says something and then 123 kids repeat in chorus what they heard. I think that is the method used in some schools abroad, but I would hate it.