Pure Shadowing: What is it?

What is Pure Shadowing?

Pure shadowing is a listening practice technique for learning English. You do shadowing by saying the words that you hear at the same time that you hear them.

Try to have no gap between your hearing and your speaking. That means you are speaking at the same time as you hear it.

Your listening source decides whether it is pure shadowing or not. It is pure if you are always shadowing English that you haven’t heard before.

If you listen to the same passage more than once you are doing repeat shadowing.

Repeat Shadowing is Fine

Some students think ‘pure’ is better. It is not better. But it is more difficult. It has a steeper learning curve.

This means many or most students will give up. So it is not better.

On the other hand, if you don’t give up, this technique is excellent. But still, I don’t recommend this technique because it takes a long time, and it is difficult.

I made this entire site so that you can do repeat shadowing instead of pure shadowing.

Good Points of Pure Shadowing

This technique is great for teaching you to predict the patterns of the language. It is great for improving your pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation of English.

Shadowing Bad Points

Pure shadowing has several bad points:

• You might give up
• Shadowing someone live
• Understanding
• Tiring

The first bad point is that it is too difficult and most students will give up. Then they stop learning and that’s a poor outcome. Once again, I recommend repeat shadowing.

Another bad point is when you are shadowing someone live. That is, you are shadowing them in person as they speak. They might get annoyed by your shadowing.

Another bad point about pure shadowing is it is very difficult to understand the meaning of the message. You are putting all your attention into shadowing and you have no attention left to think about the meaning. This can be very frustrating for students at the beginning.

A third bad point of pure shadowing is that it takes a lot of energy. After ten minutes of pure shadowing, you should feel quite tired.

Recommendations

First, I don’t recommend shadowing people. It is better to use some audio. That way, you can avoid making people feel irritated.

Also, you can play back the audio again and again. Live English speakers rarely repeat the same words again and again.

The second point about not understanding is easy to fix if you use recorded audio as I mentioned above. Then you can just listen to it after you practise it and think about the meaning.

As for the third point about making you tired, that is easy to fix. Do shadowing for short periods, and do them frequently. Three to five minutes of shadowing is about perfect in many cases, especially if you are new to shadowing.

Find some audio source that has short audio for listening to. English Listening World audio is perfect for this.

The stories are broken into sentences and you can shadow each sentence repeatedly. This helps you increase your skills faster.

Summary

If you have very high levels of motivation, you might try pure shadowing. Otherwise do the repeat shadowing or the other variations to improve your listening skills.