Shadowing drills

  Welcome to Micro-lecture of shadowing drills. It’s great to have you with me today. In this section, we will talk about how to combine listening and speaking organically to realize the output of receptive skills and productive skills. As is known to all, listening and speaking are basic skills necessary for interpreters and play a very vital role in English-Chinese interpretation. In fact, listening is a relatively independent process in the whole interpreting activity. It is located at the front of the interpreting process, starting from information input and ending but serving for information storage, including information decoding and information pre-storage. It is also a prerequisite for the whole interpretation. Therefore, the quality of listening directly determines the quality of interpretation communication. Now, let’s look at the concepts of shadowing first.

1. The Concepts of Shadowing

In our daily life, as long as there is light, there will be shadows around us. It is like a guardian who has always been with us, silent but always with us. But in terms of simultaneous interpretation, shadow training needs constantly expressing, constantly training and constantly imitating.

1.1 Background

At present, domestic dictation training situation is various. For example, teachers provide dictation strategy, guidance and training for dictation error, enrich students’ knowledge background to improve their dictation or give students a lot of dictation exercises to improve their dictation performance. These are all effective dictation training methods, but they only focus on the input of listening, ignoring the output of the speaking. Actually, as early as the 1980s, shadowing drills was applied to English teaching in China, but it was known at that time as fast tracking. For English learners, to acquire a foreign language, a large number of imitation exercises are quite necessary. Shadowing training is not a simple and unconscious mechanical repetition. The trainer must use his or her knowledge of English vocabulary, syntax and pragmatics,etc.

1.2 Definition

Shadow drills, as the most basic interpreting training method, is to follow the speaker's speech in the same language almost simultaneously. The reader must imitate the speaker's tone of voice and strive to maintain the same intonation rhythm and speed, while working with the ears, mouth and brain. Strictly speaking, it itself is an inner system of cognitive, psychological process with readers in the process of listening to internalize the listening material, through the existing knowledge and experience to the sound information decoding and encoding, so that the meaningless sound signals are changed into meaningful information, stored in the brain's short-term memory system. In the process of reading, readers must use the existing knowledge and experience, arrange and output information. Parrot is often used to describe the importance of training and imitating the same tone.

1.3 Affiliated types

According to Lambert' s analysis, shadow training can be divided into two types: phonemic shadowing and phrase shadowing.

Phonemic shadowing training refers to the practice of repeating each phonological symbol while hearing the phonological signal without waiting for a complete meaning group or even a complete word to appear. The practitioner keeps in sync with the signal of the original language, and does not need to understand the following message or message, as long as he or she tries to imitate the sound.

The phrase or group of meaning shadowing requires the trainer to wait for a period of more than 250 microseconds after hearing the acoustic signal of the source language, and to wait until a complete group of meaning has appeared before entering the phrase and profanity. The practitioner is out of sync with the original signal, and needs to understand the general content of the message and repeat the message after it is finished.

2. Specific Applications and Methods

The cognition and application of shadow training memory depends on the number and duration of the recall of short-term memory, whether it is effectively encoded and stored as long-term memory, and whether it is often stimulated to make it a habitual response. According to the role of shadow drills in learning and remembering, the operating steps of shadow drills are summarized here.

2.1 Detailed procedure

Step 1: Repeat the exercise. At the beginning of the training, only do simple reading training. You can start at the same time with the source language, follow the speaker closely with the reader in a parrot-like manner, follow the speaker in the same language almost simultaneously, and complete and accurate reproduction of the speech according to the speed of the source language. After a period of training, you can repeat a sentence a moment later than the original. Listen and speak.

The second step of the training: the interference reading training. In the middle of shadow training, add appropriate distraction exercises. At the same time of reading following training, it is required to make simple notes while listening, such as numbers, places and names, etc. While listening, remembering and speaking at the same time, ear listening, hand brain remembering and mouth speaking at the same time, so as to cultivate the ability of multi-tasking processing at the same time and improve the ability of sensory memory and short-term memory.

Step 3: Follow the reading and interpreting training. In the last stage of shadow training, with the improvement of practice, the retelling language changes from the original language to the target language, and the retelling content changes from a complete retelling of the original language to an overview of the main content of the original language. The translator should summarize the content of the original language in the original language, be able to listen, remember, think and speak at the same time and cultivate the ability of multi-tasking in the interpretation. In the last step, the long-term memory formed by shadow training method is mainly in these three aspects :(1) phonetic knowledge; (2) semantic and syntactic knowledge; (3) comprehensive knowledge which refers to the connection between semantics and general relevant knowledge.

2.2 Different corresponding stages

 The first stage is to listen and speak simultaneously. This is a practice to exercise the ability to distribute attention, and it is also the best way to improve the speed of speech, improve the speed of understanding, modify the pronunciation and intonation. This is a method of exercising instantaneous memory in shadow training. Without any information processing program, the audio and video information can be directly expressed in the auditory memory after the voice, intonation and speed are stopped, so as to achieve "hearing, sight and sight" and "no omission". Exercise the auditory organ's ability to receive information quickly. However, this kind of expression is only a kind of information carried by speech, which can only hold for a very short time. After the expression, it is immediately faded away and forgotten while reading.

The second stage is to train your temporary memory. Short-time memory has a very limited capacity and can hold only two to seven units of data of any type. Miller assumed that letters could be encoded into a memory model that could hold 7 information units. Each letter was encoded into word units, representing each piece of information. In other words, a single unit was encoded into a larger unit, which greatly expanded the memory capacity. Therefore, the translator needs to express the phonetic information heard under the circumstance of interference, which means that the phonetic information will produce meaning in the translator's mind before it disappears, so that it can be stored in short-term memory for a short time. In other words, in this training stage, the translator should learn to master the coding after the input of speech information, and convert the scattered speech information blocks into semantic coding, so that they can be stored in short-term memory for expression. In this stage, the translator needs to organize and express the whole meaning of the discourse information, find out the clues of the semantic encoding of the information, and expand the capacity of SHORT-TERM memory, so as to improve the capacity and quality of short-term memory.

The third stage is the fixation stage of long-term memory. In modern cognitive psychology, long-term memory is like a reservoir of information that has not been used but can be extracted. It has many kinds of encoding, but in shadow training, it is mainly the training of semantic encoding. "Side thinking" refers to the process of semantic encoding such as understanding, decoding, association and transformation of information in the brain. When the primitive stays in the translator's consciousness for a short time, it activates the nerve containing memory and generates new semantic knowledge through language and the information connected with long-term memory. The literature on cognitive research suggests that information retained only in short-term memory may not be retained permanently, but becomes part of memory if it is associated with other existing and meaningful memories. Retention of memory depends on repetition, repetition of conversation, or repetition of information through mental activity. Piaget believed that memories were formed repeatedly and changed each time they were recalled. In other words, long-term memory depends on constant repetition and encoding of semantic connections.

In this final stage of shadow drills, we constantly recall the original language information we have heard in short-term memory, quickly search the relevant target language information in long-term memory in the brain, and carry out bilingual transformation to form new semantic expressions. However, the translation of the training situation once again forms an experience to be stored in long-term memory. The more training opportunities, the more information is activated, and the more new experiences and knowledge are formed.

3. The Keys and Functions of Shadowing

3.1 Highlights

In general, shadow exercises need to focus on the several following key points. First of all, we should ignore the specific content of the audio, focusing on practicing speaking fast and keeping up with it, and then later find out the grammar obstacles of the new words. Second, try to imitate the pronunciation and intonation of each word derived from the speaker. Finally, shadow drills is much more like a marathon skill training, not to be rushed to success, to have the spirit of dripping stone to wait for accumulation. At the beginning of the training, you can start with the original language synchronously. Each practice should last no more than five minutes. After a period of practice, you can follow the material a moment or half a sentence later than the original. And the training material can become harder and longer. In the last stage, you are required to summarize and report what they have heard in the target language after the original language. Various film dialogues, news speeches, interview dialogues and other materials can be followed. Of course, in the course of practice, you can do some evaluation with your classmates. You can evaluate each other by self-evaluation, the interpretations from team members and teachers' overall evaluation, including the evaluation such as contents of fluency, accuracy of speed and English tone, logical coherence and information consistency.

3.2 Benefits

The benefits of the shadowing technique are beyond your imagination. The first is to train the translators' attention allocation skills, to develop the translators' multi-tasking comprehension ability and quick response ability. The second is to train bilingual conversion ability, cultivate the ability of agile thinking and flexible strain capacity. The third is to strengthen the transformation from short-term memory to long-term memory through retelling exercise and cultivate the translators' outstanding memory ability. Additionally, Someya said that shadowing technique assists to enhance the sense of prosody: the rhythm, intonation, and accent of speech. Prosody is the important element in communication because up to 40% of communication meaning is captured by prosody. Also, it makes full use of the existing background knowledge, cognitive experience and logical analysis ability, and effectively improves the interpretation comprehension and analysis ability by processing the information flowing into the hearing and mind while listening. In this way, it achieves the purpose of communication with better original language information. 

4. Conclusion

The pedagogy of college English listening has been a difficult problem for many English learners. Although Chinese college students have been learning English for more than ten years, their listening level is still not optimistic and satisfactory. In teaching, listening comprehension is simply regarded as a passive process of receiving information.

But it's really a constructive process of listening and interacting with the speaker. As the most basic method in simultaneous interpretation training, shadow drills can effectively improve students' English listening and speaking ability. Therefore, I hope that you will learn to use this method and master relevant skills in your daily English learning to adapt yourselves to the mode of simultaneous work. You can also get the ability initially to handle multiple tasks at the same time, such as listening and reasoning, understanding, memory, retelling and monitoring.

Here are your assignments for today.

1. Why should we know about shadowing drills?

2. What types does the shadowing have?

3. If we want to do some shadowing drills, what steps should we take?

4. What should we pay attention to during the training stages?

5. Find an appropriate material to complete a personal shadowing drill and evaluate it with your partner.

Thank you and see you later!