Le Baron wrote:jeffers wrote:However, I think the benefit of shadowing comes from the fact that there's no proper break (e.g. the listening part of repetition), so it is more like real speech. Repitition is obviously better for practicing pronunciation, but shadowing is an effective exercise for developing fluency and automaticity (is that a word?) This is also because shadowing requires more quick thinking than repitition, more mental engagement, which are skills needed during conversation in the wild.
This was the problem for me when the other fellow mentioned something similar in another thread: listening/repeating without engagement or whatever it was. To me shadowing feels like effort with no real thinking, because it is just a repeat-what-I-say scenario with no regard as to what the words mean. In actual speech you have to be cognisant of what you say and mean and it means having control over things, over word choice and what you want to say. I still don't know what shadowing is supposed to do for this, apart from getting your vocal apparatus familiar with forming sounds.
I could be wrong but a resource like Assimil would be ideal for shadowing due to the clear audio and you also have the French and English alongside each other. Perhaps if you could;
1-Shadow an Assimil dialogue first time round for pronunciation practice
2-You could shadow the French whilst looking at the corresponding English dialogue
3-You could listen to the French and produce what you hear in written or spoken English
4-Once you can shadow perfectly and translate either orally or in written form what is said in your target language then you can move on to the next dialogue.
***There are more experienced and more qualified advanced learners who can give better advice but I guess at least you can turn shadowing using the above points into an "active" activity rather than a passive one