- Can the shadowing exercise
replace English conversation practise?
(upbeat music)
Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook,
the posh punk of English education.
In this video I wanna talk a little bit more
about the shadowing exercise,
what it is and what it's good for.
This is really following up
on the original shadowing video
that I made that you can watch on this channel,
if you haven't already, link in the description,
all the way back in 2011
and then re-uploaded to this channel
which is actually my second channel.
I think it was 2013.
My thinking has changed a lot since then
but also there were loads of questions about it
that I never bothered to address,
so I'm addressing them now.
One such comment that I felt
needed to be addressed here,
actually I'm not gonna read you the whole comment
but I will link to it in the description,
I'll copy, paste it into the description
but basically the gist
of the very long comment, it's a bit messy,
so I'm gonna paraphrase it
is that anyone who has learned a foreign language
knows that nothing can replace real conversation.
Shadowing doesn't replace actually speaking to people.
You shouldn't be replacing anything with shadowing.
Shadowing is an exercise,
one exercise that is useful for improving one aspect
of your English.
It is useful for improving
what I call the physical side of fluency.
What I mean by that.
We can really think of fluency as being
this multifaceted thing.
First off, to speak a language well,
you need the language.
If you don't have the words and the phrases
and the expressions,
you need to express the things that you want to express,
well, you're not gonna be able to say them,
so first of all, you actually need knowledge
of the language.
You also need background knowledge
of the things that you want to talk about.
If you know jack shit about the topic
that you're trying to talk about,
then it's pretty obvious that you're not going to be able
to talk fluently about that thing.
For example, I can talk about psycholinguistics
in Japanese, my second language,
better than most Japanese people
but that's because most Japanese people
don't have a clue what psycholinguistics even is.
Conversely, take a topic such as politics
which I have no interest in whatsoever
beyond the fact that I don't really like it,
I don't really have the background knowledge
that I would want to be able to talk about that eloquently
and smoothly and present really well-thought out arguments.
It's not that I couldn't talk about politics
but it wouldn't be pretty, put it that way.
Finally, you need knowledge of cultural norms
and cultural conventions
because the way that different people say different things
changes based on their culture.
For a great example of this,
see the video that I made called How's the Traffic?
So, these three things,
the language, the knowledge and the culture
it's all about what you've got in your head
and how well organised it is.
Have you learned the language that you need
to talk about the things that you want to talk about?
Is it all sorted out and organised well in your head?
Do you have the knowledge of what it is
that you're talking about?
These are I guess what we would call creative aspects
of fluency in that you are creating phrases
and sentences in your mind
and then producing those
but we can also say that there is another important aspect
of fluency and this is where shadowing comes in.
That is the physical side of fluency.
Different languages work in different ways
and importantly they have different sounds,
different ways of saying things.
Japanese has a very tight, very repetitive rhythm.
It's quite flat compared to English
which is stress-based and it goes up
and it goes down, it has waves
and it's very, very different to Japanese
which is boom, boom, boom.
Then we have languages like Chinese
which have tones and the point is
there are all kinds of different ways
to speak a language.
Well, you need to get good at doing that
and it's quite likely
that if your first language is very, very different
especially to English,
you aren't going to be used to using your mouth muscles
in this kind of way.
Then we've got the rhythm, the tone,
the intonation with which people speak.
These are all things that you've got to get used to.
Then we've got the way
that people pause, the way that we chunk language
because we don't speak in words and rules,
no, we speak in chunks, at the end of the day.
We don't say at the end of the day.
No, we say at the end of the day.
This is chunking.
This is all part of the physical side of fluency.
You need to create positive motor habits
and what I mean by that
is you need to get your mouth used to moving
in the way that English speakers move their mouths.
You need to get used to the rhythm, the tone,
the intonation, the speed at which we speak,
the way that we speed up,
the way that we slow down,
the pauses in speech, the way we chunk langrage.
That is where shadowing comes in.
It doesn't replace anything.
It is a single part of the language learning process.
It is one exercise designed to improve one part
of your English proficiency
in amongst loads of other different things
that you can and should be doing.
Take for example what we do
in the Extraordinary English Speakers lessons.
We do do shadowing as part of the system,
as part of the process,
it's part of the way that we learn language
from each lesson,
the way that we improve our speaking and fluency
and all of that stuff
but it's only one exercise
as part of a process
and in fact, it's actually the final exercise
or depending on how you do it,
it's the final exercise that we do
because shadowing is far more effective
after you've gone through the input stages.
We do one exercise designed to perfect your listening
to get you accustomed to the language,
to get you noticing things about the language.
Then we learn the language,
we study and learn all the common phrases
and expressions and the chunks
that are in whatever sample of language it is
that we're looking at.
From there we go into shadowing.
Again, it's part of a more rounded
of a whole process.
So, the point is it doesn't replace anything,
it shouldn't replace actually speaking in conversation.
It should be part of a more rounded
of a whole process for improving your English.
That whole process is of course described in my book,
Master English Fast,
An Uncommon Guide to Speaking Extraordinary English.
Basically this walks you through mastering English
as an intermediate to advanced English learner
step by simple step.
It shows you everything you need to know,
what kind of materials you want to be using,
common mistakes that people make
as well as a whole sequence of exercises
designed for building fluency and naturalness
in English fast.
Hope that's helpful,
hope that clears up a few things.
If you found this video useful,
give it a thumbs up.
If you hated it, doesn't matter, give it a thumbs down.
I'll see you in the next video, goodbye.