A Study On The Effects Of Shadowing Task On Learner’s Oral Production

To approach the native language learners’ level is the goal of the second language learners. How to improve the second language learners’ oral production is a hot issue for researchers. The present study explores the impacts of processing method on the oral production, specifically, to make comparisons between shadowing and listening tasks of story retelling performances.Experimental method is adopted for this purpose. 12 subjects of English major in the first semester of grade 3 of a university in Jiangxi province, were randomly distributed into shadowing group(6) and listening group(6). The shadowing group listened to a story and overtly verbalized what they had heard without looking at the source text simultaneously, and then retold the story. The listening group just listened to a story and then retold the story. Three tests were designed to examine the effects of two tasks on oral production. The first two tests were successive, while the third test was conducted in two weeks later. Then three tests were transcribed and analyzed in the aspects of fluency, accuracy and complexity.An interview was adopted as the supplement to the quantitative analysis. It mainly investigated the influences of shadowing task on their attention,comprehension of the story as well as retelling performances. The interviews were conducted for twice, namely at the end of the last two tests. Five subjects in each group were interviewed.The oral fluency was measured by the number of syllabus per minute. The accuracy was calculated by content accuracy measured by the necessary reported idea-units and form accuracy measured by the free-errors T-units. Lexical complexity was measured by type-token ratio, which was calculated with the help of the software of Range 32, and syntactic complexity was measured by the subordinate clauses per T-unit. Finally, SPSS 17.0 was utilized for the results of quantitative analysis.The major findings are:(1) shadowing task cannot significantly improve the oral fluency. This may be due to the reason that overt rehearsal involved in shadowing task reduces the limited attention available to the whole comprehension;(2) both the shadowing task(p=0.001<0.05 among three tests) and listening task(p=0.000<0.05 among three tests) can significantly improve content accuracy. But shadowing task cannot significantly improve the form accuracy, which is associated with themulti-task nature of shadowing in the present study;(3) the lexical complexity under shadowing task(p=0.002<0.05) increases significantly from the first test to the third one. Compared with listening task, the ratio of type-token under shadowing task is poorer. The underlying reason is closely related with shadowing subjects’ comprehension degree of story. Besides, shadowing task shows no significant advantages in improving syntactic complexity.The present study has some pedagogic implications concerning oral production:(1) shadowing task---the complex processing mode puts a heavy cognitive pressure on working memory. Learners need long-term practices of this processing mode to make a significant progress;(2) Teachers and learners should appropriately adopt this shadowing task to arouse learners’ attention to language form and combine different processing modes to improve language learning and acquisition according to learners’ language level and material difficulty.