Shadow reading

Learning English can be hard work. There's vocabulary to learn and grammar to understand and remember, and when there is writing or speaking to be done, it's supposed to be well thought-through and correct.

The following activity requires students to switch off such language-learning functions while they instead mimic what a native speaker is saying. It's a bit like reciting prayers together in church, except that the aim is to speak at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way as the speaker.

Who it's for:
All levels

What it's for:
listening, sounding natural, understanding spoken English

What you need:
An authentic or at least only partially scripted listening text on Spotlight Audio or online and its transcript, for example Track A or C from the online element of this month's language feature "Help! It's a native speaker."

What you do:
Pick a short, authentic piece of listening that you plan to work on anyway. This month, our feature "Help! It's a native speaker" offers listening practice and transcripts at the bottom of the audio page of this site. Track A and C are both of a suitable length. The activity can be done once you have done the relevant activities in the magazine. In this way the text will already be familiar, and so will the voice, which is mine, by the way!

Copy the transcript for your students.

Play the recording and ask the class first to listen and mark on the transcript on which words and syllables the main stress falls.

Tell the students that they should now speak along with, or shadow, the recording. They should aim to speak at the same speed and with the same stress patterns and rhythm as the speaker. This will only work if the students mimic, and thus hopefully begin to grasp, the features of connected speech, and the weak forms, contractions and the sentence stress that make up natural spoken English.

They don't have to raise their voice at all — in fact, they will have to speak quietly if they want to pick up the recording over their own and others' voices. This requires some concentration and may be unnerving for some students, so play the text a couple of times only, and encourage the class to do the same activity with different texts as a regular feature of their self-study.

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 The next Try it Out post will appear on Monday 2 August.