This study examined whether directing participants’ attention to different aspects of the content (i.e., semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic) during content shadowing would influence the improvement of their phonological processing skills.
This study examined whether directing participants’ attention to different language processing aspects (i.e., semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic) during content shadowing would influence the improvement of their phonological processing skills (i.e., sound perception, realization of prosody, and articulation rates). With this aim, the author developed four types of shadowing training with certain language processing task so that participants’ attention would be directed to a specific stage of processing (i.e., semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic) [quotrightB?]•a prosody shadowing (SH 1: standard version of SH), a shadowing with a Japanese-translation verification task (SH 2: semantically-focused SH), a shadowing with a grammaticality judgment task (SH 3: syntactically-focused SH), and a shadowing with a pragmatic judgment task (SH 4: pragmatically-focused SH) , each including 30 sentences. A total of 60 Japanese EFL learners were divided into four groups according to their OQPT scores so that the scores did not differ significantly among the groups. They completed one of the four types of shadowing and were then required to take reading aloud and shadowing tests, each including three sentences, as pre and posttests. The main outcome was that content shadowing trainings (SHs 2- 4) improved some of the phonological processing skills (i.e., sound perception skills and articulation rates), irrespective of the shadowing type completed. These results suggest that even if learners’ attention is directed to a specific processing aspect (i.e., semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic), some of their phonological processing skills (i.e., sound perception skills and articulation rates) improve to the same extent as when they complete prosody shadowing.
