The Language Teacher
04 - 2002
Shadow Talking Warm-ups
John Small
Kumamoto Gakuen University
QUICK GUIDE
Key Words:Shadowing, repetition
Learner English Level: All
Learner Maturity Level: Middle school through adult
Preparation Time: 10-15 minutes per shadow talk
Activity Time: 20-25 minutes
Materials: None
I often open classes with an anecdote from my life. This seems to provide a relaxed, personal activity that isn't particularly bothered by latecomers. But how many are listening, let alone understanding? Shadow talking exercises answer these questions and make the anecdote not only the perfect warm-up, but also a great all-around exercise.
Tim Murphey (2000) explains three kinds of shadow talking:
- 1) Complete Shadowing: Teacher (or another speaker) pauses after language chunks that are manageable for students to comprehend and repeat. Students repeat everything they hear, out loud, exactly as they hear it.
- 2) Partial shadowing: Students repeat key words. They might make grammatical changes, for example, partner A says, 'I play guitar...' can be shadowed by partner B as, 'You play guitar...', perhaps in a softer voice. Alternatively, the speaker doesn't pause and the other student repeats what they can, such as the end of each sentence. Murphey (1998) also refers to this as 'echoing'.
- 3) Silent shadowing: Students silently repeat in their heads, as much as they are able.
For my warm-up activity, I first ask students to do complete shadowing. Hearing students repeat serves several purposes:
- 1. It shows me how much they understand.
- 2. It's a reminder to shadow talk (subsequently silently) throughout the class.
- 3. Repeating forces students to listen carefully.
- 4. Students learn from the repetition.
- 5. It's good practice for natural pronunciation and intonation.
- 6. Students become aware of grammatical structures when they later summarize my talk.
Procedure
Step 1: Shadow Talk the Story
First, write a topic with several key vocabulary words on the board. Alternatively, only write the vocabulary and have students guess the topic. One exercise that I use early in the semester is 'My Hometown'. Pre-teach the related vocabulary: population, location, climate, famous people, famous products, and famous sites. Then talk about your hometown adjusting the length, speed, and difficulty to the level of the class. Students repeat exactly what they hear. If they don't understand or aren't listening--and this is fairly easy to see--repeat or simplify.
Step 2: Summarizing
Before students summarize the talk, do a brief sample summary (which they don't vocally shadow), restating the narrative as you expect them to summarize: 'John was born in a small town in NY state...' Each partner then summarizes the narrative. The summaries can be shadowed or partially shadowed as well.
Step 3: Student Talks
Students by this time have heard and spoken the story a couple of times. Using the six related vocabulary items as starters, they then tell their partner about their own hometowns. Because of the structure and repetition, students who would normally struggle when asked to talk about their hometown can successfully participate and do a lot of talking.
Step 4: Topics and Variations
If your anecdote is amusing or funny, this is even better. Topics such as my most embarrassing moment, my greatest success, and my scariest moment, all work well. These can also be told as split stories: tell it up to the key point ('What was that big black creature moving along the wall of my bedroom?') then stop, perhaps clowning as if you can't recall. Students predict and then tell their own scary story in the same manner. When I think students have heard enough about my life, I do shadow quizzes, generally about simple geography facts. This incorporates worthwhile learning into the exercise (try to find one single student who knows the capital of Canada, let alone its province!). For higher level classes I do news quizzes which they summarize then try to answer with a partner; I also invite students to try to stump the class with their own recent news story question. For lower level classes, I use a repetitive sentence pattern: 'In high school, sometimes I took the bus. Sometimes I took my bike. Sometimes I took my mom's car. The bus ride took 20 minutes...' Once, confounded by the lack of success of a university class, I simply changed the emphasis of one positive-thinking sentence: 'I can speak English. I can speak English. I can speak…' For a summer review, I made a cassette tape of all the semester's shadow talks and had the media center make copies for students.
Step 5: Conclusion
Remind students that although they are repeating, they should not be parrots. They should think about what they're repeating. They can attend to meaning, grammatical structures, particular vocabulary, or pronunciation. Shadow talking warm-ups force students to listen carefully, learn from repetition, and gives them structure and ideas for speaking.
References
Murphey, T. (1998). Language Hungry. Tokyo: Macmillan Language House.
Murphey, T. (2000), Shadowing & Summarizing. National Foreign Language Resource Center. http://www.LLL.hawaii.edu/nflrc/
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