The Effects of Shadowing Technique on Boosting First Year Students’ Listening Comprehension

Abstract

Although listening skill is a fundamental language skill among other language skills for foreign language learners, students frequently face challenges in understanding spoken language, making it difficult for them to develop their listening skills, and often struggle with listening comprehension. Effective listening comprehension facilitates the development of language. To help students overcome these challenges and improve their listening comprehension, these issues must be recognized, and effective listening techniques must be implemented. The study aims to show how the shadowing technique helps student’s English listening comprehension. This research was employed as an experimental study with a non-equivalent control group design.  Purposive Random sampling was selected and used, consisting of 20 subjects of fresher students of the English Department- College of Education- Salahaddin University-Erbil for the academic year 2023-2024, who are taught listening comprehension using the shadowing technique. The students were divided into two groups: control and experimental. Data was collected via pre- and post-multiple-choice tests and audios of listening materials. Descriptive and T-test analyses were used to understand learning methods and outcomes. The study concluded that shadowing is an effective technique for teachers to use in the classroom. With this technique, students become more comfortable with using longer or more challenging audio clips and repeating the process to boost their skill in listening. Besides, regular incorporating shadowing into listening comprehension helps students become more confident and fluent in listening skill.