By Lucía Rodríguez.
To understand and speak a new language, our brains must get used to new sounds and structures; decoding them in ways we are not used to, and our vocal organs must try and detach themselves from the muscle memory created by the sound system (phonology) of our own native language. Also, we need to move in different ways and shapes to produce new sounds and make them familiar; it is hard but not impossible.
Research shows that listening sessions, or language input, is one of the most important aspects of learning a language, one that is often overlooked for more mphasis on talking and drilling grammar. It’s also the one that takes the least effort to do and can be done just about anywhere.
There’s also evidence that in listening and watching what’s going on, your brain is picking up on comprehensible input: sound input that you can understand (without knowing the words per se) just because of the visual and contextual clues.
It is simple. Sit back and listen to your target language. Shadowing is a specific method that will help you accelerate your language learning. Shadowing mimics the natural way that we learn a language, through listening. Doing these aids in the development of sound patterns, learning how to pronounce words as well as when to use right intonation.
According to Alexander Arguelles, a polyglot well known for his work in foreign language learning, was the one to really advocate for and develop shadowing, based on linguistic research in the field of Language Acquisition. He says shadowing is basically taking a language you don’t know and basically planting in your brain the “living” side of the language sending motor signals to your speech organs and muscles. This method can help you train the physical aspect of speaking a new language: pronunciation, rhythm, melody, intonation, pauses, and breathing.
If you’re creating a solid motor base for the language you’re learning, then the things related to grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation will have a sort of physical frame to fall on top of and start filling it in. In other words, the physical phase of speaking/living a language, does NOT have to come last after months or years of just studying grammar, reading, and writing; it can be simultaneous, and, in many ways, it can even come first or very early on in the process.
Getting Started
To use shadowing for learning a language, simply find an audio in your target language and repeat what you hear. Arguelles suggests using audio that starts out slow with great enunciation and gradually goes into a more normal pace. In addition to that, walking around purposefully and with good posture as you repeat the audio, he believes, aids language learning.
There are two types of shadowing I use with my students:
- Listening to the audio while repeating the words from a transcript or subtitles
- Blind shadowing which is only listening to the audio and repeating what you hear. Here you focus mostly on sounds.
Try shadowing by choosing any audio clip in Spanish from 2 to 5 minutes long or so: news, shows, movies, clips, interviews, monologues, dialogues, or anything else if it features fluid, natural and uninterrupted native speech, with subtitles or transcripts, preferably.
What do you have to do first? Listen to the clip a couple of times just taking in the sound with all its details (this includes pauses, pitch, intonation, rhythm, stress) but not necessarily meaning or vocabulary, so try not to look at transcripts or subtitles yet. That means you’ve had some exposure to the spoken language without figure out the meaning. You will focus, specifically, on the sound and how it flows.
After a few times of just listening, you can try to start mimicking everything, right as soon as you hear it, “shadow” the original audio clip. It’ll be hard at first, but don’t worry about accidentally skipping what you can’t keep up with since you are listening to continuous, real-time audio and pronouncing almost simultaneously. Just don’t pause the audio.
Try to take in the flow, even if all you can do is mumble sounds. After you’ve done this a few times, the next step would be to finally start following the transcript/subtitles with your eyes as you listen simultaneously.
It’s important that you don’t see it as a reading exercise. The text should only guide you a bit better in what you have otherwise already been listening to for a while. It will help you aim better at the pronunciation, but the weight of the attention should always be on the sound. So, if a sound didn’t seem to match a word spelling, you’re seeing, choose the sound as the real reference.
By doing this, you’re exercising active listening and active imitating/mimicking, which is very different from repetition. Repetition is good for pronunciation of specific words or sounds you are perfecting; shadowing, on the other hand, is for training the overall physical aspects of speaking in a particular language and improving the recognition of phonemes (sound units of a language), for which even pitch, rhythm and breathing are important.
The very last step would be to sit down and finally break down the actual content; look for words you don’t know, examine sentence structure and grammar, and try to understand what was being said the whole time. You might notice that before you do this last step you had already started understanding the content by just listening and shadowing.
Finding materials
Any resource that features short films or video clips becomes an excellent option. YouTube and Vimeo are highly recommended because you can find uncountable audio stories from native speakers, with different accents or voices, on any topic you decide. On YouTube you can look for any Spanish dialogue video that has subtitles/transcripts. Although most have English subtitles, there are options for adding Spanish subtitles. Clips from shows or movies are also great. If you want to go with audiobooks Assimil or Easy Languages are great options.
Benefits of the speech shadowing technique.
-You improve your listening skills. It may seem obvious, but you are sharping your listening abilities if you are listening. This doesn’t involve much active work, as you can see. Listening is a rather passive skill. However, your brain works hard to digest much information as you practice speech shadowing. It takes in new sounds, words, and grammar rules.
-You improve your speaking skills. Listening is the initial stage. However, the objective is to mimic what you hear, which leads to an improvement in your speaking abilities.
-You improve your pronunciation. Instead of reading the language, you concentrate on listening to it. You inevitably improve your pronunciation when you listen to a word and the language’s accent and intonation rather than reading its spelling.
-You improve your vocabulary. About 1,200 words are said during a 10-minute speech. How much could you learn? Write down the words you liked best or found most helpful to make it even more powerful.
-You become more fluent. You’ll undoubtedly gain fluency because you’re essentially mimicking a native speaker speaking at a natural pace; with practice, you’ll be able to use regular phrases in casual conversation.
-You pick up grammar rules. Our minds begin to process all the syntax and sentence structure when we hear oral language frequently. As a result, we unintentionally begin structuring the phrases similarly.
Finally, speaking in shadows is something you can practice at any level. Beginners will find this strategy to be helpful even for children. How are they taught? When they are young, they don’t understand a word being spoken, but after a few months, gradually, they become fluent native speakers. Try to practice this innovative technique and you will become natural and fluent easily.
If you have any question, remember in or school Spanish Perfecto, we are happy to help.
Bye
