Shadowing involves language learners attempting to speak along to audio texts. Its focus is on sounds more than word recognition. Further, meaning is secondary in most shadowing tasks. In this workshop the presenter offered the audience main points of shadowing for EFL learners. There were five topics addressed in the presentation: (1) The definition of shadowing (2) the general effectiveness of shadowing, and with what type of student/audience; (3) effective uses of shadowing; (4) past research on shadowing, and (5) the future directions for research on the topic. The participants were guided through several activities were they experienced shadowing as students might experience it in classroom contexts. After each activity a discussion was held about the possible applications of the strategy in the teaching contexts of the participants. It was a hands on workshop and participants were able to engage in lively discussions throughout the program.
Presenter: Dr. Yo Hamada is an associate professor at Akita University. He holds a Master’s degree in TESOL from Temple University and a doctoral degree in Education from Hiroshima University. He has been researching shadowing and recently has published a book, titled Teaching EFL Learners Shadowing for Listening: Developing learners’ bottom-up skills, from Loutledge (2016).
Akita JALT 