Shadowing with Oral Reading: Effects of Combined Training on the Improvement of Japanese EFL Learners' Prosody

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This paper is concerned with the improvement of English prosody of Japanese EFL learners. A new type of speaking training that combines shadowing with oral reading was introduced into English classes in order to raise learners' reproduction rates in shadowing practice and to efficiently improve their English pronunciation. Twenty Japanese university students participated in ten weekly training sessions utilizing this combination of practice techniques. For the purpose of gauging improvement over the ten-week period, a pre-test and a post-test were given before and after the ten weeks, respectively, in which they recorded their readings of the same short English passage. Their recordings were acoustically analyzed to examine any improvement in their English prosody. The results revealed that in the post-test they tended to enhance the contrast between neighboring stressed and unstressed syllables by using the duration, F0 (pitch), and/or intensity of each syllable. In addition, significant increase in duration and pitch range was observed in sentence-final words/segments with nuclear pitch accents, suggesting a better realization of English intonation and final lengthening. All of these findings show that the combined training method of shadowing with oral reading improved rhythm, intonation, and final lengthening in English produced by the Japanese EFL learners.

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