Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpreting

JAITS＜研究ノート＞

Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions
and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpreting
Omissions in Shadowing and its Relationship with Source Text Interpretation
Hiroko YAMADA(Kansai Gaidai College)
There has been a fervent debate concerning the idea that shadowing is merely a monolingual
repetition of verbal output, rather than being a useful tool for enhancing content-processing
capacity (Pöchhacker, 2004/2016). However, few studies have explicitly examined how ashadowing task can contribute to consecutive interpreting according to effectivenessevaluations based on empirical data. The present study aims to identify the most frequent
incidences prompting disruptions in shadowing and to assess its correlation with the accuracyof source text interpretation. For this purpose, this study utilized data from 56 participants who
took shadowing tests and the subsequently conducted English-Japanese consecutive interpreting
tests in the interpreting courses at a Japanese university. Then the variability of the efficacy of
shadowing was investigated. The results demonstrated a positive effect of shadowing on thegroup that administered intensive shadowing treatment while some provocative findings werealso ascertained. Thus, this study elucidates the true nature of a shadowing activity.

1. Introduction
Shadowing refers to an exercise in verbal training for learning a new language that involves“the immediate repetition of auditory input in the same language with either minimal delay‘phoneme(
shadowing’) or at greater latencies ‘phrase(
shadowing’)”(Pöchhacker, 2004: 184/
2016: 200). To date, the usefulness of shadowing in the preliminary stage of interpreter training
for increasing the awareness of sounds and cadences in the source language has been advocatedin the arena of interpreting professionals as well as in academia. However, this is a controversial
topic, and there has been a fervent debate concerning whether shadowing is really a useful toolthat ultimately leads to enhancing interpretation skills and overall listening comprehension

YAMADA Hiroko, “Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy inEnglish-Japanese Interpreting: Omissions in Shadowing and its Relationship with Source Text
Interpretation,” Interpreting and Translation Studies, No.16, 2016. Pages 145-164. © by the Japan
Association for Interpreting and Translation Studies

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skills, or if it is simply a mechanical repetition exercise (Lambert, 1989), which requires noeffort to understand the spoken words. This contention dates back to the early 1990s.
Pöchhacker (2004) invoked Lambert (1991) as a fervent advocate of the shadowing task, andSeleskovitch and Lederer (1989: 168) as staunch opponents, who argued that a shadowing task
exemplified“the division between the holistic training approach and the‘cognitive approach’
based on the identification and separate practice of component skills.”Kurz (1992) cited
neuropsychological findings and characterized“a monolingual repetitive speech production as apoor approximation to simultaneous interpreting”without having active analysis of the speech
input (cited in Pöchhacker, 2004).
Thus, in recent years, shadowing has continuously been a target of heated debate, and there
are divergent viewpoints on the usefulness of the task. However, this has not yet been discussed
to a satisfactory extent based on the evidence obtained. In particular, few studies haveempirically analyzed the effects of shadowing on source text interpretation. Interest in therelationship between shadowing and simultaneous interpreting has remained high over the lastfew decades (Pöchhacker, 2004/2016). However, few studies have explicitly examined how ashadowing task can contribute to the development of source text interpretation per effectivenessevaluations based on empirical data.
In this context, the present paper first identifies the incidences that prompt the disruptions
or departures in shadowing and then explores the correlation between shadowing and post-task
recognition of semantic source text information. The author argues that a shadowing task istrainable. If students are well trained in shadowing over a fair amount of time, and then undergoa certain stage of development, they will reduce the incidences promoting disruptions or
departures in shadowing. They will also be able to shift their shadowing style from mere
repetition focused on just prosody to content-based shadowing, acquiring the meaning-oriented
processing approach, which ultimately leads to progress in English-to-Japanese interpretation.
This study aims to obtain evidence that will yield the salient attributes of a shadowing task forbolstering and enhancing students’interpretation skills and overall aural comprehension skills
when introduced in a university setting.
2. Literature review
Some previous studies have explored the attributes of interpreting and shadowing from thecognitive approach of language processing. Lambert (1989) compared the recall and recognition
scores of participants after administering simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting,shadowing, and listening tests, and found that the recall scores yielded no significant differences
between listening and the two interpreting conditions, whereas shadowing resulted insignificantly lower recall than listening and consecutive interpreting (cited in Pöchhacker,
2004/2016). A similar result for the recognition scores between shadowing and simultaneous146

Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpretinginterpreting was also reported by Pöchhacker (2004/2016). Gerver (2002) explored thefundamental nature of simultaneous interpreting and shadowing performances from thecognitive approach by examining the effects of the source language presentation rate on both
performances. He systematically varied the input rate of presentation of a source language, forboth simultaneous interpreting and shadowing. The result confirmed the earlier findings ofCarey (1968) and Treisman (1965): that is, significantly more words were correctly shadowed
than correctly interpreted when input rate became faster. He then concluded that both shadowers
and interpreters correct their errors, but interpreters tend to work more, which suggests that theunit of analysis is“phrase”for interpreters and“word”for shadowers (Gerver, 2004). Gerver(2002) also found that the ear-voice span for interpreting becomes greater than for shadowing
not only because processing in interpreting takes longer but also because a phrase ininterpreting may be the unit of storage, which is larger than shadowing.
Another issue worth discussing is whether shadowing is a trainable activity. In this context,
a shadowing task was analyzed from the so-called expert-novice paradigm. Moser-Mercer et al.
(2000) conducted an experiment on various language-processing skills that are assumed to bepart of expert proficiency in interpreting for both professional interpreters and students. She
found that neither the shadowing task nor the verbal fluency tasks yielded evidence
discriminating between expert and novice performance. In a comparable study, Sabatini (2000,
2001) stated that near-professional student subjects in her experiment adopted a meaningoriented approach to the shadowing task, which made the difference between shadowing andsimultaneous interpreting obscure (cited in Pöchhacker, 2004/2016).
3. Research Questions
The research questions addressed in this study are as follows:
1) What is the most serious incidence that prompts disruptions or departures in shadowing
performances?
2) Could intensive shadowing treatment, applied to research participants over a certain period,
enhance the accuracy of their shadowing performances?
3) Could intensive shadowing treatment, applied to the research participants over a certain
period, ultimately increase the participants’ability to interpret the source text?
4. Method
4.1. The Research Participants
The present research was conducted during spring semester in 2015 at the university where theauthor was teaching. Research participants constituted third- and fourth-year students registeredfor introductory courses in English-to-Japanese interpreting. None of them had ever undergoneinterpreter training. The subjects were enrolled in three different classes in the interpreting147

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course, and the majority were English majors, with two non-major students in each class. The
intensive shadowing treatment was administered to the experimental group of 19 students forabout 30 minutes during every lesson (90 minutes), twice a week. A total of 30 lessons wereconducted in the whole semester. On the other hand, 37 students from the other two classes
combined were classified as“the control group”to which no particular intensive shadowing
treatment was applied, but merely simple shadowing tasks, without any distinction between
prosody and content, were applied three times, just after listening to the source materials oncewith textbook closed. The 90-minute lesson was provided to the control group once a week,
which accounted for 15 lessons in the whole semester. In addition, almost equivalent verbal
consecutive interpreting training from English to Japanese was administered shortly after
shadowing training to both the experimental and control groups. All lessons were given in the
CALL room or simultaneous interpreting room.
4.2. Procedure for Intensive Shadowing Treatment
The textbook used in the intensive shadowing activity was entitled“Shadowing”(Kadota &Tamai, 2004). The treatment was administered for about 30 minutes in each lesson just before
consecutive interpreting was undertaken. The task entailed the following steps, conducted in thefollowing order, with the students wearing headsets in the CALL room.
1) Listening (textbook closed)
2) Prosody shadowing (textbook closed)
3) Content shadowing (textbook closed)
4) Time lag or time delay shadowing (textbook closed)
5) Checking (textbook open)
6) Recording the students’shadowing performances in their own computers (textbook closed)
7) Listening to their own recorded performance while checking the errors in shadowing(textbook open)
8) Wrap-up with the final goal to output 100% of words correct
Tamai and Kadota (2004) distinguished content shadowing from prosody shadowing whenadministering shadowing practice to the students. Indeed, if a teacher does not give them any
instruction about these two distinctive elements, they perform shadowing without any concern
about whether it is prosody-oriented or content-oriented, and simply do it“parrot-like”—that is,mechanically (Lambert, 1989).
Therefore, in the present study, first, the students performed prosody shadowing, in which
they had to be attentive to the stress, pitch, tone, speed, rhythm, intonation, pause, and otherprosodic elements of a speaker. As they were wearing headsets in the CALL room, they could
focus their attention on the prosody without being disturbed by other students’voices or theirown voices. In the second stage, they performed content shadowing in which they had to be148

Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpreting

attentive to the content of the text.
Next, the students were instructed to perform“time lag shadowing”in order to acquire theprocessing components needed to prepare for the simultaneous interpreting training intended foradministration at the end of the semester. In this activity, the students were not supposed to
output verbally what they heard word for word almost simultaneously, but when listening to one
semantic chunk (phrase), they were to retain it in their memory, and then verbally output what
they had just heard very quickly before the start of the next chunk.
The production of the target message usually lags behind the source message by a few
seconds or a number of words, which is called decalage, or the time delay in translation. It isestimated that there is a lag of about five words for interpreting and of about two to three words
for shadowing between the input and the corresponding output (Christoffels & De Groot, 2004).
Time lag shadowing is a challenging and demanding task for students in an introductoryinterpreting course, as they usually cannot wait for more than three words after hearing them;thus, it is considered that a delay of a maximum of four words would be appropriate for them. In
this training, instructors should be careful about the text selection and have their students try
this activity after administering enough training in normal shadowing. If the same source textthat has been already used in normal shadowing is also used for time lag shadowing, the load
imposed on short-term memory may be reduced. Much of the empirical evidence suggests thatan interpreter uses short-term memory to retain the words just heard and long-term memory to
put the information into context (Phelan, 2001: 4-5). In this respect, time lag shadowing would
be effective in enhancing content-processing strategy in both short-term and long-term
memories.
As a summary of the series of shadowing activities, the students record their shadowing
performances into their own computers, and listen to them with their textbook open to check forthe part they did not correctly shadow. Recording their performances is repeated several times toreduce the number of errors they commit.
4.3. Data collection
Data were collected from 56 students in total from the mid-term examination, which was
conducted after 17 lessons for the experimental group, and after 7 lessons for the control group.
The final examination was conducted after all lessons were completed (30 for the experimentalgroup, and 15 for the control group). A total of 56 research participants took the mid-term andfinal examinations, in which the students were first assigned the shadowing condition and thenthe consecutive interpreting condition, both using the same source text. Their performances of
shadowing and consecutive interpreting from English to Japanese were recorded in their
computers. In addition to these tests, other consecutive interpreting tests were administered,
which were irrelevant to this experiment, between the shadowing and interpreting conditions to149

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reduce the practice effects of two conditions. Thus, the total amount of time consumed by the
mid-term or final examinations reached around 50 minutes each. The author obtained writtenconsent from the students to use the test results as data.
4.4. Material
The source text used in the mid-term examination consisted of 233 words, which were extracted
from the text of“Japanese Ancient Capitals, Nara and Kyoto”(Ohata, Okuda, & Tanimoto,2009), while the one used in the final examination consisted of 197 words, which wereextracted from a text entitled“Internet”(Mizuno & Kagimura, 2005).
1) Excerpt of the shadowing text for the midterm examination.
The most popular sightseeing spots are Todaiji Temple and Kasuga Shrine located in theextensive Nara Park where many deer can be seen. The deer in Nara Park are said to be
divine messengers of the Kasuga Shrine. They are so internationalized that they understandEnglish, believe it or not.... Todaiji Temple is the largest wooden building in the world, andit houses the Daibutsu, or big Buddha, which measures about 15 meters in height....
(Ohata, Okuda, & Tanimoto, 2009)
2) Excerpt of the shadowing text for the final examination.
As you probably know, the Internet is said to have originated from the computer system in
the Pentagon. After this system was adopted by research institutes and universities, it
became widely used in the United States. Today, it is said that more than one hundred
million people are using the Internet for e-mail around the world. When I met a businessconsultant in Washington DC, he told me that in his opinion, there were three important
things for a businessman to do right now.... (Mizuno & Kagimura, 2005)
4.5. Measurements
When analyzing shadowing performances, incidences resulting in disruptions or departures canbe categorized based on five events: omissions of words, substitutions, corrections, additions,and distortions (Gerver, 2002). The author also referred to the categories of translation departureestablished by Baric (2002: 80–81), and the error category made by Gerver (2002). Then theauthor created the following classification for the present research.
Incidences as an assessment criteria of this study1)“Omissions of words”involve skipping omission, comprehension omission, and delayomission. Skipping omission refers to a single word present in the original version, which is left
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Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpretingout of the verbal output text by the shadowing performer. Comprehension omission involves theomissions in longer stretches of input of eight words or more—that is, a single lexical item suchas a qualifier or short phrase—owing to the participant’s inability to comprehend the original
text. Delay omission means the omission of a large unit of text seemingly and primarily becauseof a delay in the output speed compared to the input one (Barik, 2002).
2)“Substitutions”involve approximate or less precise responses. Although they aregrammatical and meaningful, they alter the meaning of a sentence in some way (Gerver, 2002).
3)“Additions”refer to items not found in the original text, which are added to the output text
(Baric, 2002).
4)“Corrections”occur whenever a speaker interrupts his output to correct previous words andphrases (Gerver, 2002).
5)“Distortion”is an error or inaccuracy in the output of a word, which distorts the intended
meaning (Gerver, 2002).
In the present research, the number of words that were not correctly shadowed was counted
based on the above-mentioned classification. This was a straightforward task. However, incontrast to counting incidences in the shadowing performances, assessing the interpreting
performances requires a more complex approach. In this process, paraphrase should beconsidered because word-for-word translation was not expected, and indeed, such would nothave been a good translation from the interpreter’s point of view (Gerver, 2002). Rating theparaphrased translation and yielding the specific score for it in the criteria-referenced test are
not easy tasks for average university instructors. Therefore, employing the scoring rubric
created by this author (Yamada, 2015) is recommended.
In the scoring rubric, for each phrase (semantic chunk) in one sentence, specific points
were allocated according to difficulty in translation. To ascertain the difficulty level intranslating words, a“word frequency list”in an academic area (http://www.wordandphrase.
info/frequencyList.asp) was used. Additionally, based on the error classification (Cary, 1968,
and Balzani, 1990, cited in Gerver, 2002), the author created the error categories in interpreting.
They are as follows:“word omissions,”“word substitutions,”“additions of words,”“meaning
errors of words,”“distortions of words,”“errors in rendering figures and proper names,”and“others.”This scoring rubric can expedite the assessment process and accurately measureconsecutive interpreting performances with facility. Hence, in the present research, this scoring
rubric was employed to assess the interpreting performance.

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5. Results
5.1. Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions
5.1.1. Comparison of the Incidences
Each student’s shadowing performances were recorded in his or her computer, were recovered
through USB flash drive, and then assessed. The number of words including these incidences
was counted, and is shown in Figures 1–4.

Incidences

Incidences
Omissions

Omissions

Substitutions

Substitutions

Additions

Additions

Corrections

Corrections

Distortions

distortions

Figure 1. The experimental group in the midterm. Figure 2. The control group in the midterm.

Incidences

Incidences

Omissions

Omissions

Substitutions

Substitutions

Additions

Additions

Corrections

Corrections

Distortions

distortions

Figure 3. The experimental group in the final exam. Figure 4. The control group in the final exam.
5.1.2. Qualitative Data Analysis
Upon closer examination, specific natures held by respective incidences were observed asfollows.
1)“The omission of words”was the most frequent incidence that caused shadowing
disruptions compared to the other four incidences. When the input words were unfamiliar to thestudents, comprehension omissions occurred because of their inability to understand themeaning of the uttered words. Further, delay omissions occurred when the speaker uttered ashort phrase very quickly—for example,“believe it or not”in the text shown in section 4.4.
Omissions of longer stretches with input of eight words or more, which were caused bycomprehension omissions or delay omissions, occurred more frequently in the control groupthan in the experimental group. Once speaking errors begin, the result is a snowballing effect152

Incidences Prompting Shadowing Disruptions and Shadowing Efficacy in English-Japanese Interpretingthat causes a long stretch of omitted words (Gerver, 2002).
2) The frequency of“substitutions”was the second highest.
The most frequent error committed by the students in substitutions was skipping the“s”of thethird-person singular, skipping the plural“s,”or skipping the ordinal indicator“th”from theoriginal words. Substitutions also involved errors stemming from confusion caused byhomonyms or near-homonyms. For example, the word“extensive”was accidentally misheard
and output falsely as“extended”or“extending.”Confusing the sound of words in the text also
caused substitutions: for example, in“I would like to talk about the Internet, which is one of themost important themes for the people nowadays,”many students mistakenly pronounced theword“themes”as“things.”These types of mild semantic errors are possibly less damaging
than omissions in terms of the text’s interpretation.
3) The most salient “additions” made by the students were adding definite or indefinite articles
not found in the original text: for example,“High school students use the Internet even to get[the] information as part of their daily lives,”and“Daibutsu... that measures about 15 meters in(a) height.”
4) “Corrections” which was the least frequent incidence, occurred when the students heard
words that were difficult to pronounce. For example, when the sentence“They are sointernationalized”was heard, some students could not correctly and quickly pronounce theword“internationalized,”and hence, they uttered it again. When they heard numerals, theyoften made a correction. Repeating numbers quickly appears to be difficult for some students:for example,“Kyoto was founded in 794, and there are about 1,600 Buddhist temples.”At thispoint, many students somewhat hesitated, which led to correcting themselves and to trying tospeed up their output by catching up with the next phrase.
5) “Distortions” occurred when the students heard an unknown or unfamiliar word, and tried toimitate that sound without understanding the correct meaning of the word. One example is“thefamily shrine of the Fujiwara, the most powerful clan during the Nara and Heian periods.”In
this utterance, many students were unable to correctly pronounce the word“clan,”and falsely
pronounced it as“clown.”
The results showed that omissions of words markedly stood out from the other four in both theexperimental and control groups, and in the mid-term as well as final examinations. This result
indicates that omission is the most serious incidence that prompts shadowing disruptions anddepartures.
5.2. Comparative Analysis of Shadowing Performance (Experimental vs. Control)
As the omissions of words was the main factor that prompted shadowing disruptions, thenumber of omitted words was compared between the experimental and the control groups by153

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employing the F test and t test. The results are shown in Table 1.
Table 1
Descriptive statistics of the number of omitted words in shadowing in the mid-term and the final
examinations (Experimental vs. Control)Exp.

Omissions in the Mid-term Exam

Omissions in the Final Exam

N

Mean

SD

t

N

Mean

SD

t

19

18.00

12.38

-2.57

19

20.74

12.53

-2.97

Cont.
37
33.11
23.96
-2.57
37
35.89
20.32
-2.97
Note: For the mid-term examination, *p < .05, **p < . 01. The total number of words to beshadowed was 233.
For the final examination, *p < .05, **p < .01. The total number of words to be shadowed
was 197.
The results indicate that the difference in the number of omissions between the experimentalgroup and the control group in the mid-term examination was statistically significant at the 0.05
probability level: p < .05, t(54) = -2.57, p = .013. Similarly, in the final examination, the numberof omissions was significantly different between the experimental and the control groups: t(54)= -2.97, p = .004, p < .01. With respect to the number of the omissions, the experimental group
had significantly fewer omissions than the control group. Regarding the standard deviation, thecontrol group is much higher in value than the experimental group for both examinations, whichindicates that the accuracy of shadowing performance varied significantly among students in thecontrol group compared to those in the experimental group.
Considering the result of this study, the intensive shadowing treatment administered to thestudents is most likely to be effective for enhancing the accuracy of their shadowing
performances. However, in this case, the fact that the total number and frequency of lessons
varied between the experimental and the control group should be carefully examined.
5.3. Comparative Analysis of Consecutive Interpreting (Experimental vs. Control)
Consecutive interpreting tests from English to Japanese were administered following the
shadowing tests. The results are shown in Table 2.

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Table 2Marks Obtained in Consecutive Interpreting from English to Japanese in the Mid-term
Examination and the Final Examination (Experimental vs. Control)Interpreting in the Mid-term ExamInterpreting in the Final Exam

N

Mean

SD

t

N

Mean

SD

t

Exp.

19

75.77

15.15

2.02

19

59.63

16.92

2.64

Cont.

37

61.27

28.51

2.02

37

46.02

20.87

2.64

Note: Mid-term Exam *p < .05

Note: Final Exam *p < .05

Table 2 indicates that the difference in the marks obtained in interpreting between theexperimental and the control group was statistically significant: for the mid-term examination:t(52) = 2.02 p < .05; and for the final examination: t(54) = 2.64 p < .05 This result suggests thatthe experimental group was far better able to perform consecutive interpreting than the control
group. In addition, the standard deviation value that varied in quality in terms of each student’sperformance was much smaller for the experimental group than the control group.
5.4. Shadowing or Interpreting Performances Related to the Length of Treatment
Next, when the lesson proceeded from the first lesson to the seventeenth lesson (at the
mid-term examination), and to the thirtieth lesson (at the final examination), variations in theexperimental group’s shadowing and interpreting accuracy level were investigated. Similarly,
with respect to the control group, the results of the shadowing and interpreting performanceswere compared between the first and seventh lessons (at the mid-term examination) and thefifteenth lesson (at the final examination), respectively. For this purpose, the number of omitted
words was compared between the mid-term examination and the final examination, andconsecutive interpreting scores were also compared between the mid-term and the final
examination for both groups. The findings are presented in Table 3.
Table 3Comparison in Omissions in Shadowing between the Mid-term and the Final Examination, andComparison in Interpreting Scores between the Mid-term and the Final Examination.
The experimental group
Mean

SD

t

df

p

Omissions (Mid – Final)

-2.74

11.65

-1.02

18

.319

Interpreting (Mid – Final)

16.14

21.26

3.22

17

.005**

Note. *p < .05, **P < .01155

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The control group
Mean

SD

t

df

p

Omissions (Mid – Final)

-2.78

14.74

-1.15

36

.258

Interpreting (Mid – Final)

15.27

28.54

3.21

35

.003**

Note. *p < .05, **p < .01
The finding observed in these descriptive tables is that the omissions were not significantly
different between the mid-term and final examinations in either the experimental group or thecontrol group. However, the accuracy of consecutive interpreting between the mid-term andfinal examinations was statistically different at the 0.005 probability level for the experimentalgroup: t(17) = 3.22, p < .01, and at the 0.003 probability level for the control group: t(35) = 3.21,
p < .01. The marks obtained in consecutive interpreting in the mid-term examination weresignificantly higher than those in the final examination for both groups.
5.5. Correlation between Omissions in Shadowing and Consecutive Interpreting
Next, the causal relationship between shadowing and the source text interpretation was
analyzed. For this purpose, Pearson’s correlation coefficients for the omission of words and thescores of consecutive interpreting performances were investigated.
Table 4
Pearson’s Correlation Coefficients for the Omission of Words and Consecutive Interpreting
Performances
Experimental group
Interpreting Mid

Omissions Final

Interpreting Final Omissions Mid

Interpreting Mid
Omissions Final.05

Interpreting Final .12-.23

Omissions Mid

-.12

.56*

-.13

Interpreting Mid

Omissions Final

Interpreting Final Omissions Mid

Note: N = 19
Control group
Interpreting Mid
Omissions Final-.32

Interpreting Final .36*-.48**

Omissions Mid.79**-.44**-.60**

Note: N = 37 **p < .01
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With regard to the control group, the coefficient of the obtained marks in consecutive
interpreting and the number of omissions of words were significant at r = -.444 for the mid-term
examination and r = -.475 for the final examination. However, the experimental group did notyield a significant correlation in terms of a difference in either of the examinations.
5.6. Comparison in TOEIC TEST between the Experimental and the Control Group
Finally, to examine the general versatility of the shadowing activity followed by consecutive
interpreting training sessions in the classroom, the reduced version of the TOEIC listening test
was conducted in the final lessons of the semester: during the fifteenth lesson for the control
group and during the thirtieth lesson for the experimental group. The degree to which thestudents’comprehensive listening comprehension skills were enhanced through the shadowing
and consecutive interpreting activities was examined by means of the F test and t test.
Table 5Comparison in TOEIC Cut-down Version Test on a 50-point Scale Between the Experimental
Group and the Control Group
N

Mean

SD

t

Experimental Group

19

41.00

4.08

2.64

Control Group

37

36.84

6.20

2.64

Note. *p < .05
The above findings illustrate that the mean difference is significant, in which t(54) = 2.64 p= .011, p < .05
The experimental group obtained significantly higher scores on the TOEIC listening test thanthe control group.
6. Discussion
6.1. Incidences Prompting Shadowing DisruptionsFirst, the present research aimed to identify which incidences would cause inaccurate
shadowing performances. Several findings related to the disruptions of shadowing performance
were reported, which may have practical significance. One vital incidence that clearly affects
the quality of shadowing performance was the“omissions.”The results indicated that thefrequency of omissions was markedly high among the other four incidences for both theexperimental and the control groups. This result suggests that omissions can be interpreted as arough index of the quality of a shadowing performance, and that the fewer the number ofomissions in a shadowing performance, the fewer the disruptive occurrences in theperformance.

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Next, comparing the number of omissions in the experimental group with those in thecontrol group, it was found that the experimental group made significantly fewer omissions thanthe control group. Despite the preliminary character of the research, the discrepancies in thenumber of total lessons, and the frequency of the treatment between the experimental and thecontrol group, it is most likely that the intensive shadowing activities are effective in reducing
the incidences that prompt disruptions or departures, which would result in more accurate
shadowing performance. Furthermore, it makes sense that shadowing would be a trainable
activity, and the ability to perceive and repeat the input message could be enhanced if the
shadowing task is intensively applied to the subjects with extended time and frequency. In thisrespect, the results confirm the aforementioned“expert-novice paradigm”(Moser-Mercer et al,2000 cited in Pöchhacker, 2016), which demonstrated that the shadowing task yielded noevidence that discriminated between expert and novice performance.
6.2. Shadowing Efficacy in English-to-Japanese Interpreting
The present study resulted in one of the most interesting findings, which concerned the effectsof shadowing on the source text interpretation. To investigate how the shadowing activity
contributes to the interpretation of the source text information, consecutive interpreting tests
were administered after the shadowing test was applied, and the same source text was used forboth tests. This experiment yielded significant results; the experimental group obtained more
marks in consecutive interpreting than the control group by a considerable margin. Thissuggests that the experimental group developed abilities to interpret the source text information
more effectively in the process of thirty lessons than the control group did. As the intensive
shadowing training proceeded, the experimental group seemed more likely to have transitioned
from mere repetition in another language to a meaning-oriented processing approach.
However, it is argued that any increment in interpreting performance for the experimentalgroup might be from the effects of the intensive shadowing tasks or the consecutive interpreting
training, which was administered after shadowing activities throughout the thirty lessons.
Hence, this increment of marks obtained in interpreting performance needs to be carefully
examined in the future. Nevertheless, some tentative conclusions may still be drawn from theresults. It should be noted that the errors in shadowing committed by the experimental groupwere significantly fewer than those in the control group, and that the experimental group
markedly exceeded the control group in interpreting, as well. Thus, it can be inferred that thestudents may have acquired content-processing strategies, which would facilitate source text
input and target text output—that is, decoding from English to encoding into Japanese during theperiods of intensive treatment. Given that the experimental group obtained far better scores ininterpreting than the control group in both examinations, it is likely that the intensive shadowing
treatment enhanced their abilities in interpreting the source text.
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6.3. Effectiveness of Shadowing Activity Related to the Length of Treatment
The present study yielded interesting findings in shadowing performances in terms of the total
number of times and frequency of the treatment. Considering the very fact that the accuracy inshadowing and in consecutive interpreting of the experimental group, which took thirty lessons
during one semester, was much higher than those of the control group, which took fifteen
lessons, it is assumed that the longer the duration and the higher the frequency of treatments inshadowing or interpreting, the more effectively the treatments work to enhance the quality of
performances. Nevertheless, the findings show that this model does not fit the data very well.
Neither the experimental group nor the control group yielded a significant difference inaccuracy of shadowing between the mid-term and the final examination. This result may be
attributable to the fact that after finishing the midterm examinations, the experimental group had
only thirteen lessons to complete, and the control group had only eight lessons left by the time
the final examinations were administered. Hence, the students’shadowing performances would
not have improved markedly in such a short time span.
In a similar vein, Kurz (1992) conducted a longitudinal study in which she tested five firstyear students on a shadowing task and administered two simultaneous question- and-answer
tasks at both the beginning and end of one semester of regular training. Kurz found that themost pronounced improvements showed in the more demanding task: that is, answering the“why”question while listening to the next question rather than the shadowing task.
6.4. Interpreting Performance in Association with the Length of Shadowing Treatment
Next concerns the interpreting tests conducted subsequently. Perhaps this is the mostprovocative set of findings from this study. Surprisingly, the marks obtained in the consecutive
interpreting during the mid-term examination were significantly higher than in the final
examination for both groups. The author analyzed this unexpected phenomenon. A closer
examination revealed that although the author had tried to suit the source texts of the mid-term
and final examinations as much as possible to students’intelligibility and comprehension, thesource texts of the mid-term examination were nonetheless likely to be easier to comprehend
than those of the final examination in terms of familiarity with the source text information. In
fact, the theme of the source text in the mid-term examination (“Nara and Kyoto”) appeared tobe more familiar to the students than the final examination’s theme (“Internet”). It is possiblethat the students more easily adapted to the source-culture-bound message in the midterm
examination than in the final examination.
Pöchhacker (2004) stated that comprehension is not a passive, receptive process; rather, it
depends crucially on what is already known. Chernov (1978, 1979/2002) deemed expectationbased processing as fundamental to the interpreting process, and the predictability ofcontextualized utterances as crucial to the comprehension process, in which“probability
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prediction”constitutes the core of processing.
In this context, this finding suggests that the quality of the shadowing performance is not
significantly affected by the intelligibility of the source text information or by the duration of
the shadowing training provided. Conversely, with respect to the consecutive interpreting, theintelligibility of the source text information would override the duration and the frequency of
the training administered, and it would seriously affect the quality of interpreting performance.
With regard to interpreting, as the unfamiliarity of source text information increased,
comprehension, transfer, and production became correspondingly more difficult and disrupted.
Hence, it seems likely that the decrement in interpreting performance for the final examinations
was owing to the effects of the more difficult source text.
The result of this study implies that interpreting involves a more complex decoding andencoding process than shadowing, which simply transmits the speech. This supports Gerver’sstatement (2004), that“Unlike the interpreter, the shadower only has to repeat, not tounderstand, what he hears. In a sense, shadowers’scores (words correct) are similar tointelligibility test scores, while interpreters’scores demonstrate both intelligibility andcomprehension.”
6.5. Correlation between the Shadowing and Interpreting Performance
Another unexpected result concerns the different pattern of associations for correlation between
the shadowing and interpreting performance shown by the control group and the experimentalgroup, respectively. Regarding the control group, the omissions in shadowing and the quality ofconsecutive interpreting performances were inversely correlated; that is, the smaller the numberof omissions, the higher the marks for interpreting. This applied to both the midterm and final
examinations. Surprisingly, however, the experimental group yielded dissimilar results in thecorrelation between the shadowing and interpreting performance in both the midterm and final
examinations. The experimental group did not yield a significant correlation between the
shadowing and the interpreting in either examination.
It seems that in the process of the early stage of introducing shadowing activities, research
participants may have increased their awareness of sounds and cadences, and may also haveassociated the sounds of words with their meanings. Consequently, the quality of theirshadowing and interpreting performances were correlated with each other. This processing
capability was possessed by the control group. However, in the experimental group, theprocessing effort seemed to proceed somewhat differently, and consequently the accuracy of the
shadowing performance was not associated with the accuracy of interpreting performance. It isinferred that as the duration of the treatment was extended, participants acquired verbal
dexterity by mere repetition in another language without needing to think seriously about themeaning of each successive word uttered by the speaker online.
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In shadowing, straightforward repetition is possible word by word, or even phoneme byphoneme, without translating the individual meaning of each successive word in the speaker’soutput (Pöchhacker, 2004/2016). Conversely, interpreting involves a much more complex seriesof cognitive activities than shadowing. Even though the error index is based on omitted words
in shadowing, functionally, the number of correct words in a shadowing performance still
appear to be independent of the degree or the nature of the interpreting accuracy. Without doubt,
however, the nature of the message has a strong impact on the interpreter’s processing activity(Pöchhacker, 2016), as was mentioned earlier.
In summary, shadowing activities might be effective for boosting interpretation skills fromEnglish to Japanese in the early stage of its introduction, but if the shadowing activities arecontinuously assigned for a longer time, they may not necessarily lead to further enhancementof interpreting abilities. In other words, the students would not be likely to successfully transfer
the processing strategies from mere repetition to meaning-oriented approaches, and thereby thestudents’interpreting abilities would not be enhanced in correlation with their shadowing skills.
However, in the present study, as aforementioned, the total number of classes and the frequencyof the classes were different between the experimental and the control group; hence, thefindings need to be carefully interpreted with these limitations in mind.
6.6. Effect of the Intensive Shadowing Treatment on Listening Comprehension Ability
The results of the TOEIC listening test was also investigated. The findings indicate that theexperimental group obtained significantly higher scores than the control group. In this respect,
the intensive shadowing treatment is most likely to be effective in enhancing listening
comprehension abilities when the time and frequency are increased. However, this data may not
be suitable for an overall statistical analysis of the positive effect of shadowing activities onlistening comprehension because whether this advantage was because of the intensive
shadowing tasks or the subsequently conducted interpreting training sessions was still uncertain.
This aspect deserves greater scrutiny.
7. Conclusion
The present study attempted to examine the incidences prompting shadowing disruptions, andshadowing efficacies in English-to-Japanese interpreting. The data suggest several important
observations concerning shadowing effectiveness. First, omission was identified as the vitalincidence causing disruptions in shadowing. The findings indicate that intensive shadowing
activities applied to the research participants with increased frequency over time would reduce
the omissions in shadowing, which would ultimately prove the positive effect of shadowing on
the decoding process of sound information. With respect to interpreting, intensive shadowing
treatment would also contribute to enhancing the abilities in interpreting the source text.
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However, other variables show mixed effects in terms of the nature of the source materials
and the duration of training. Initially, it was anticipated that the incidences of errors inshadowing and accuracy in interpreting could be correlated with each other. Nevertheless, in theexperimental group, the emerging pattern was not consistent with what was expected. Moredisruptions occurred in interpreting than in shadowing when the material was more difficult andunintelligible. This demonstrates that regarding interpreting, the intelligibility of the source text
information would override the time and the frequency of the shadowing training administered,and it would seriously affect the quality of interpreting performance. The findings suggest thatthe interpreting process cannot be explained as a direct linguistic transfer of lexical units andsyntactic structures, given that interpreting evidently involves a much more complex series ofcognitive activities than shadowing.
8. Pedagogical implications
Part of the reason for the relative lack of expected results likely stems from the students’inabilities to undergo the transition from monolingual repetitive speech production to ameaning-oriented processing approach. In this context, the present study may offer somepedagogical implications. The shadowing training might function effectively in the early stageof its introduction, but it is possible that the students would not function any better, even if theadministering period were unduly extended. As students become accustomed to the shadowing
task, the efficacy of the shadowing activities might eventually wear off over time. Although it is
impossible to discount this possibility, attempts to maximize the effectiveness of shadowing
activities are worth pursuing. For instance, an instructor might give specific advice for further
training based on an individual student’s performance or provide mixed introductory exercises,
including abstraction of ideas, message prediction, etc. Above all, time lag shadowing ordelayed shadowing focused on memory constraints and predictability would be essential for
facilitation in decoding the translation unit. Systematic approaches, including the use ofprinciples derived from a large number of observations from various types of shadowing
activities currently employed in university classrooms, are of crucial methodologicalimportance. It is expected that shadowing activities in combination with various languageprocessing skills will be introduced in normal English language lessons at universities thatcurrently deploy only didactic curricula.
8. Limitations
There are several limitations to this study. The present research reflects that the sample consistsof two classes, which differ in the total number of administering time, and the frequency of the
shadowing and interpreting lessons during a semester. The intelligibility of the source texts
turned out to be not standardized between the two examinations, as well. In addition, regarding162

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the TOEIC listening test, no pretest was conducted before starting this experiment to investigate
the students’initial capabilities in listening comprehension. Thus, limits should be placed on thegeneralizability of the research findings presented here. However, notwithstanding theselimitations, the findings do suggest the positive effects of shadowing activities. In the future, theidea proposed in the present research should be tested more comprehensively and elaborated
upon. Pöchhacker (2004/2016) stated that the effectiveness of shadowing still remains unclear,and this is possibly the most contentious issue in interpreting pedagogy to date. Nevertheless,however exploratory, this study may offer some insights into the efficacy of shadowing.

About the author
YAMADA Hiroko is an associate professor at Kansai Gaidai College. She is registered for adoctoral course at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.
Her research interests include interpreting pedagogy-particularly testing and assessment ofinterpreters’performance.

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