The Effects of Shadowing on Taiwanese Senior High School Students' Pronunciation Performance and Perceptions

• Main Authors: Tsai, Jen-Hsiang, 蔡任翔
• Other Authors: Chang, Feng-Lan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/jg6a35

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 105 === The present study aimed to examine the effect of shadowing on senior high school students’ pronunciation performance. The participants of the study were composed of eighty-three tenth-graders from two classes in a senior high school in central Taiwan. One class was the experimental group (n=42), while the other class served as the control group (n=41). Throughout the eight-week training program, all the participants used the same learning materials. The only difference was in the teaching method employed. As for the experimental group, the instructor offered instructions on pronunciation through shadowing. In contrast, the control group adopted a traditional approach to teaching pronunciation (read-aloud approach). Three native English speakers blinded to the purpose of the study served as the raters of the 15-sentence pronunciation pre-and post-tests. These tests and the pre-and post-experiment questionnaires comprised the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. As the results suggested, the post-test scores of the experimental group increased statistically significantly more than the control group in their pronunciation performance. As far as the students from the control group were concerned, they did not make statistically significant improvement in their post-test scores. The results of the study suggested that shadowing was an effective method of improving learners’ pronunciation performance. Last but not least, the analyses of the qualitative data in the study corresponded to the quantitative results. From the present study, four pedagogical implications for pronunciation instruction were drawn as follows: (1) shadowing should be integrated into the English curriculum in Taiwan to boost learners’ learning effect; (2) pronunciation should be taught in English classes and should never be seen as subordinate in a text-oriented learning atmosphere; (3) shadowing should be incorporated into listening, reading, speaking, writing or vocabulary activities to achieve the goal of improving students’ holistic English abilities; (4) different learning materials related to shadowing should be developed and promoted in class to meet students’ individual needs and boost their learning motivation.