The Effects of Shadowing on Listening Comprehension and Listening Strategies

The study investigated the effects of shadowing method both on L2 listening comprehension and listening strategies. The participants of the study taking TOEIC courses were given two shadowing tasks and required to upload their shadowing files on their e-class. After completing shadowing tasks, they were given a post-test and strategy questionnaire to measure group differences between shadowing and non-shadowing groups. To measure their listening comprehension, a test was selected including TOEIC part2, part3, and part4. Strategy questionnaire contains 58 items for cognitive, meta-cognitive, and socio/affective strategies. The result showed the shadowing group demonstrated a significant difference in listening scores of three parts of TOEIC ; part 2, part 3, and part 4. Some meta-cognitive strategies such as advance organization, directed attention, performance evaluation, showed meaningful difference between groups. Among cognitive strategies, academic elaboration, translation, note-taking, and paralinguistic inferencing strategies were the ones that shadowing group used more frequently. However, listening strategies, in general, made little difference between the shadowing and non-shadowing groups, which failed to show statistically significant differences between groups. This study suggests that shadowing tasks bring a positive effect on learners’ listening proficiency but it remains to be seen whether it directly helps to improve L2 learners’ strategy use.