Recent evidence suggests that the shadowing technique (i.e., the immediate vocalization
of speech stimuli) may be an effective tool to improve L2 English learners’ pronunciation.
However, little is known about the effectiveness of embodied shadowing (i.e., the immediate
vocalization and physical reproduction of multimodal stimuli) and the role of the individual
(embodied) shadowing accuracy during training (i.e., the time-lapse or latency between the
target L2 speech/gesture and the learners’ ...
Recent evidence suggests that the shadowing technique (i.e., the immediate vocalization
of speech stimuli) may be an effective tool to improve L2 English learners’ pronunciation.
However, little is known about the effectiveness of embodied shadowing (i.e., the immediate
vocalization and physical reproduction of multimodal stimuli) and the role of the individual
(embodied) shadowing accuracy during training (i.e., the time-lapse or latency between the
target L2 speech/gesture and the learners’ (embodied) repetition). This training study first
investigates the impacts of embodiment during shadowing on improving L2 English
pronunciation, and secondly, it assesses the potential effects of the learners’ embodied
shadowing accuracy during pronunciation training on comprehensibility, accentedness, and
fluency gains.
The present MA Thesis used the audio-visual corpus obtained by Tamburini (2020), in
which fifty-four learners of English were trained during six sessions in two shadowing
conditions, namely Non-Embodied Shadowing and Embodied Shadowing. An analysis was
performed on embodied shadowing accuracy during pronunciation training. A reassessment of
pronunciation scores in pre-test and post-test reading tasks revealed a significant improvement
in speech fluency in the Non-Embodied Shadowing group, but no significant improvement in
comprehensibility, accentedness, or fluency in the Embodied Shadowing condition.
Interestingly, it was demonstrated that shorter speech and gesture latencies significantly
predicted better comprehensibility and fluency scores at the post-test, suggesting that
shadowing latency is a key variable when performing embodied shadowing. This study
highlights the positive effects of using non-embodied shadowing techniques to improve L2
speech fluency and encourages instructors using the shadowing technique to pay attention to
the shadowing accuracy of their students by training them on shortening their latency times.
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