The Effect Of Shadowing On Senior High School Students’ Listening Performance

As an increasing requirement for English teaching under the new curriculum and English core competence,improving students’ listening performance has been the focus of researchers and educators.In teaching practice,the bottleneck in improving students’listening performance lies in the lack of more effective training methods.Recently,shadowing has received attention from researchers because of its solid theoretical foundation,including theories of memory,image schema and Anderson’s three-phase model of listening,but it has not received corresponding attention in teaching practice.Therefore,this thesis focuses on the effect of shadowing on learners’ listening performance to compensate for the neglect of effective listening method instruction and the lack of students’ active participation in traditional teaching.Based on the three phases of Anderson’s listening model,this study is aimed at exploring the effect of shadowing on senior high school students’ English listening performance.The research questions are as follows:（1）What effect does shadowing have on senior high school students’ listening performance in the perception phase?（2）What effect does shadowing have on senior high school students’ listening performance in the parsing phase?（3）What effect does shadowing have on senior high school students’ listening performance in the utilization phase?This research employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.The subjects of the research are selected from two parallel classes with equal listening levels in the second year of a high school in Xuzhou,both with the number of 45 students.One class is the experimental class,in which the author carries out listening instruction under the guidance of shadowing.The control class,on the other hand,is where the teacher applies traditional listening instruction,i.e.,leading students to follow the recording while learning texts or practicing listening while doing exercises.Both classes are given a pre-test and a post-test,consisting of sentence dictation,true or false questions,and multiple-choice questions of listening comprehension.The data collected are analyzed and processed by SPSS,including independent sample T-test and paired sample T-test.The qualitative research is conducted in the form of interviews.As a complement to the quantitative research,six student representatives from the experimental class are selected according to the high,middle and low levels,and then their interviews are recorded and the contents are analyzed.The research steps are divided into three stages:the preparation stage,the experimental stage and the data analysis stage.Finally,the analysis of the collected data reveals the experimental results and the pedagogical implications.The following conclusions are drawn from the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data collected:（1）In the perception phase,statistical data show that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group,thus shadowing exerts an effect on students’ listening performance in this phase,helping them better segment the speech flow and improve their ability of sound discrimination.（2）In the parsing phase,statistical data show that there is no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group,thus shadowing has no obvious effect on students’ listening performance in this phase.That is to say,shadowing might not be so effective in helping students to perform syntactic analysis centered on verbs.（3）In the utilization phase,statistical data show that there is a significant difference between the experimental group and the control group,thus shadowing has an effect on students’ listening performance in this phase,promoting them to link the acquired propositional models with the relevant schema existed in their brain to achieve the ultimate comprehension of the listening materials.This research suggests that shadowing enjoys beneficial pedagogical implications for listening:Firstly,as lack of concentration remains a major problem for students in listening,it is practical for teachers to apply shadowing in listening teaching,which requires a high degree of concentration to train students’ attention and concentration.Secondly,during the training,teachers should focus on enhancing students’pronunciation and intonation.Unfamiliarity with the pronunciation habits of native speakers poses another obstacle for students,under which shadowing demonstrates an excellent means of correcting pronunciation.After the previous imitation and correction,teachers can further improve the learners’ sound discrimination skills through shadowing,increasing their accuracy and precision in listening.Thirdly,it is beneficial for students to accumulate relevant knowledge and experience schema of different topics in their minds and to enhance their listening comprehension ability during shadowing,which facilitates the positive transfer of language acquisition.