Shadowing technique to teach Listening to A1 level EFL students

Abstract

Shadowing is a listening technique that develops the bottom-up process (the understanding of the smallest units of the audio input such as individual sounds) of the listening skill by training the learners’ ears to recognize phonemes, words, and thus phrases. It is said this is a useful technique for the development of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ listening skills. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the effect of the shadowing technique on the listening skill of A1-level EFL learners from Luisa de Jesús Cordero High School. An explanatory sequential mixed method design will be carried out by using the listening part of the A2 Key for Schools from Cambridge Language Assessment exam and a close-ended survey to assess the impact of shadowing on the students’ listening performance and their perception of shadowing. For this purpose, experimental and control groups were carried out. The study outcomes provide information about how shadowing, as a technique to teach listening, has influenced English learners’ listening skill and their perspectives in an Ecuadorian high school setting.