You will ACTUALLY speak like a native speaker. When you try to sound like a native speaker, soon enough you won't have to fake it anymore. One more benefit of this technique is that it familiarizes your mouth with the physical movements required to produce the sounds, so you can reduce your accent and get closer to the native pronunciation.īasically, it's "fake it until you make it". It also helps you improve your listening and pronunciation skills because you must listen carefully in order to repeat. What's more is that shadowing helps you "think in English" because you don't have to translate back and forth in your mind. When it comes to speaking, you can create proper sentences quickly, accurately and immediately without having to think about it. When you apply the shadowing technique, you will create neural connections in your brain.
In other words, you imitate the pronunciation, intonation, stress, chunking and so on. The goal is to sound like a native speaker. Then simply repeat – or "shadow" – what you hear, almost simultaneously with the recording. With this method, you need an English audio clip you want to study. It is a language learning technique developed by an American professor named Alexander Arguelles. Not the most effective way! The best way? Okay, you know that learning phrases and sentence patterns is THE KEY to speaking English fluently, but HOW do you learn them effectively?īy reading? Listening? Listening and repeating?