The impacts of the use of shadowing technique on students oral production of english past tense morpheme

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY ­­­­­­­ ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC LÝ THE IMPACTS OF THE USE OF SHADOWING TECHNIQUE ON STUDENTS’ ORAL PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH PAS

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY

­­­­­­­

ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC LÝ

THE IMPACTS OF THE USE OF SHADOWING TECHNIQUE

ON STUDENTS’ ORAL PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH

PAST TENSE MORPHEME

MASTER OF ARTS IN TESOL

Hồ Chí Minh City, 2021

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY

­­­­­­­

ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC LÝ

THE IMPACTS OF THE USE OF SHADOWING TECHNIQUE

ON STUDENTS’ ORAL PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH

PAST TENSE MORPHEME

Major code: 8 140 111

MASTER OF ARTS IN TESOL

Supervisor: PHAN THỊ NGỌC THANH, Ph.D

Hồ Chí Minh City, 2021

KHOA ĐÀO TẠO SAU ĐẠI HỌC

GIẤY XÁC NHẬN

Tôi tên là: ĐÀO THỊ NGỌC LÝ

Ngày sinh: 27 / 04 / 1993 Nơi sinh: Tây Ninh

Chuyên ngành: Lý luận và phương pháp dạy học bộ môn tiếng Anh

Mã học viên: 1781401110017

Tôi đồng ý cung cấp toàn văn thông tin luận án/ luận văn tốt nghiệp hợp lệ về bản quyền cho Thư viện trường đại học Mở Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh Thư viện trường đại học Mở Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh sẽ kết nối toàn văn thông tin luận án/ luận văn tốt nghiệp vào hệ thống thông tin khoa học của Sở Khoa học và Công nghệ Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh

Đào Thị Ngọc Lý

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I hereby declare that the master thesis “The impacts of the use of shadowing technique on students’ oral production of English past tense morpheme” is my own work

I declare that this thesis has not been submitted, in whole or in part, at any other

institution in order to obtain a degree

I declare that any information cited from the publishers or unpublished work written by others has been acknowledged in the text and a bibliography has been provided

Ho Chi Minh City, 2021

Dao Thi Ngoc Ly

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thesis paper would not have been completed without the great support that I received from many people First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Phan Thi Ngoc Thanh for her invaluable feedback on my research

Without her guidance, my thesis paper would not have been completed

I gratefully recognize the help of all the lecturers and friends on the MA course at Ho Chi Minh City Open University for their thoughtful advice and support In addition, I wish to show my gratitude to all my colleagues and students for their cooperation and

encouragement

Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the great support and love of my beloved mother and best friends This paper would not have been possible without their warm encouragement

ABSTRACT

The pronunciation of the English past tense morpheme has remained a major challenge to Vietnamese learners Consequently, researchers have conducted a number of studies on effective techniques that can help learners pronounce the –ed morpheme better This study aimed to investigate how the use of shadowing technique impacted the seventh graders’ oral production of the past tense morpheme at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School in Ho Chi Minh City In order to achieve the aim of the study, the researcher employed a

quantitative approach with a one-group quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design The sample of the study included 35 seventh-grade students at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School After having received detailed instructions on shadowing technique, the participants attended 6 shadowing practice sessions, which took place once a week The instruments consisted of a questionnaire, a pretest and a posttest The questionnaire was used to

record the participants’ exposure to English and their previous experience with the

shadowing technique in order to control extraneous variables that could influence the research outcomes The pretest and posttest were employed to figure out the impact of the use of shadowing technique on students’ oral production of the past tense morpheme The results revealed that the implementation of the shadowing technique produced a

statistically significant effect on the participants’ performance In addition, with regard to the developmental phases in expressing temporality, the results showed that the use of the shadowing technique facilitated students to some extent Based on the findings, some recommendations were suggested to teachers of English, students studying English and researchers with interest in the shadowing technique

Keywords: shadowing technique, past tense morpheme, pronunciation, developmental phases, second language learning

TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II ABSTRACT III LIST OF TABLES VI

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY 1

1.2RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY 2

1.3RESEARCH QUESTIONS 4

1.4SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY 5

1.5DEFINITIONS OF TERMS 6

1.6SCOPE OF THE STUDY 7

1.7CHAPTER SUMMARY 7

1.8ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 7

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 9

2.1THE REGULAR SIMPLE PAST TENSE MORPHEME 9

2.1.1 Developmental phases in the expression of the past 9

2.1.2 The problematic oral production of the past morpheme –ed 11

2.1.3 The reasons for difficulties in producing the morpheme –ed encountered by Vietnamese learners of English 15

2.2S HADOWING TECHNIQUE 16

2.2.1 The definition and history of shadowing technique 16

2.2.2 The differences between shadowing and repetition 20

2.2.3 The challenging features of shadowing technique 20

2.2.4 The benefits of shadowing 23

2.2.5 The applicability of shadowing 24

2.3PREVIOUS STUDIES ON THE SHADOWING TECHNIQUE 25

2.4RESEARCH GAP 28

2.5CHAPTER SUMMARY 30

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 31

3.1STUDY DESIGN 31

3.2RESEARCH SETTING 31

3.3POPULATION AND SAMPLE 32

3.4MATERIALS 33

3.5INSTRUMENTS 33

3.5.1 Questionnaire 33

3.5.2 Pre-test and post-test 34

3.6DATA COLLECTION 35

3.7DATA ANALYSIS 37

3.8VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY 39

3.8.1 Internal validity 39

3.8.2 External validity 40

3.8.3 Content validity 40

3.8.4 Construct validity 40

3.8.5 Reliability 41

3.9.CHAPTER SUMMARY 42

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 43

4.1FINDINGS 43

4.1.1 Descriptive statistics of the questionnaire 43

4.1.2 Descriptive statistics of pre-test and post-test 45

4.1.2.1 Descriptive statistics of pre-test 45

4.1.2.2 Descriptive statistics of post-test 46

4.1.3 Normality test 48

4.1.4 Paired t-test 48

4.2DISCUSSION 49

4.2.1 Students’ oral production of the past tense morpheme 50

4.2.2 Students’ developmental phases in the expression of temporality 52

4.3CHAPTER SUMMARY 52

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS 54

5.1CONCLUSION 54

5.2IMPLICATIONS 55

5.3LIMITATIONS 56

5.4SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 57

REFERENCES 58

APPENDICES 65

APPENDIX A 65

APPENDIX B 67

APPENDIX C 68

APPENDIX D 70

APPENDIX E 72

APPENDIX F 76

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Three Broad Developmental Phases in Terms of Temporality Expression by

Table 2.3 The Order of English Morpheme Acquisition of L1 Learners by Brown

Table 2.4 The Order of English Morpheme Acquisition of Learners from Various L1

Table 3 The Procedure of Shadowing Adopted from Hamada (2012) 33

Table 4.3 Numbers and Percentages of Participants Classified into Developmental

Phases in Expressing Temporality According to Their Pre-test Results 44

Table 4.5 Numbers and Percentages of Participants Classified into Developmental

Phases in Expressing Temporality According to Their Post-test Results 46

Table 4.6 Normality Test of the Scores of Pre-test and Post-test 46

Table 4.7 Paired Samples T-test on Pre-test and Post-test Scores 47

Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study

Due to globalization, there has been a strong demand for global languages that can enhance international communication According to the United Nations, there are six official international languages, which are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish With approximately 1.35 billion speakers (Statista, 2021), English has been regarded as one of the most common lingua francas in the world As a result, English is taught as a compulsory subject in school curriculums of many countries around the

world, including Vietnam Considering the importance of English, great effort has been put into improving the quality of English teaching and learning, especially speaking skills

in general and pronunciation in particular Along with the introduction of a

communicative approach, Vietnam has experienced several modifications in English teaching practices since the second half of the 1980s (Ha, 2005) However, owing to numerous reasons, including the significant differences between the target language and mother tongue, pronunciation has been a challenging aspect for Vietnamese learners of English In particular, Vietnamese learners encounter special difficulties in pronouncing inflectional morphemes, especially the past tense morpheme

The –ed morpheme has remained a major challenge to Vietnamese learners due to several reasons The past tense morpheme occurs relatively late according to the order of grammatical morpheme acquisition (Brown, 1973; Krashen, 1977) In addition, the low frequency of regular verbs compared to irregular verbs, as well as the negative and

interrogative forms of the simple past lower the salience of the regular past form In regard to its variant pronunciation, the –ed morpheme has three allomorphs /ɪd/, /t/ and /d/, which means it can be pronounced differently depending on the final sounds of

regular verbs, and therefore causes considerable confusion for learners Among the three allomorphs, /t/ and /d/ are the most challenging ones because they often create consonant clusters in several phonetic environments, which do not exist in Vietnamese and therefore

tend to result in discomfort associated with their pronunciation The difficulty in

pronouncing complex codas has also led to the fact that the –ed morpheme is often

deleted in some phonetic environments by both L1 and L2 speakers This reduces its salience, and therefore negatively affects learners’ acquisition of the past tense

teaching interpretation, shadowing has been recognized as an effective technique in

language teaching Empirical research conducted on shadowing has proved that the use of this technique not only develops learners’ working memory and produces positive effects

on their psychology, but also noticeably contributes to learners’ development of both listening comprehension and speaking skills In particular, the practice of shadowing technique allows learners to improve their perceptions and production of unfamiliar sounds that do not exist in their mother tongues In the case of Vietnamese learners, this technique can help them improve their oral production of the past tense morpheme

Although the results of several studies have shown the positive effects of

shadowing technique on learners’ speaking and listening skills, this technique has not been widely researched in the educational settings of Vietnam For this reason,

considering Vietnamese learners’ difficulties in the pronunciation of –ed, this study

aimed to investigate the impacts of the use of shadowing technique on students’ oral production of the past tense morpheme

1.2 Rationale for the study

Despite the fact that shadowing technique has been increasingly recognized as a useful technique to teach listening and speaking skills (Fatimah, 2017; Hamada, 2016;

Sumarsih, 2017), there is little empirical research on this technique in various educational contexts and with students at low level of proficiency In fact, most studies on shadowing were conducted in Asian countries such as Japan and Indonesia with the participation of tertiary or high school students In Vietnam, there is a scant investigation into the effects

of shadowing on students’ achievements In addition, the use of shadowing with

Vietnamese students at different levels of education is not fully studied To be specific, despite the fact that shadowing has been proven to be more beneficial to lower

proficiency learners (Hamada, 2016), most studies are carried out on university students The lack of empirical research on the effects of shadowing on students at low level of proficiency has made it unsafe to draw general conclusions about the effectiveness of this technique Furthermore, since shadowing has been known as a useful technique to

improve students’ fluency and intonation, there is a question whether this technique works on other components of speaking skills, namely the pronunciation of the regular past morpheme Additionally, unlike other techniques such as repetition, shadowing not only helps students improve their pronunciation, but also brings great benefits to them in numerous aspects When practicing shadowing, students can develop their listening and speaking skills, enhance their working memory, take part in the learning process more actively, and become less anxious when using the target language outside the class room (Arthurson, 2019b; Hamada, 2018c; Sumiyoshi & Seventant, 2017) Consequently, the application of shadowing to teaching practices can facilitate students’ learning progress

in various aspects

Moreover, due to the fact that the accurate production of –ed remains a major challenge to Vietnamese learners of English, and that the use of morphological means is considered a sign of language competence, further research is needed to help students acquire the regular past morpheme Considering the benefits of the shadowing technique and Vietnamese learners’ difficulty in the pronunciation of –ed, this study was conducted with the participation of seventh-graders at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School The students have already learnt the past simple, but they still found it difficult to produce the past tense morpheme orally To be specific, the students were confused by the variant ways of

pronouncing the morpheme –ed The late occurrence of the past tense morpheme in the acquisition order, together with its low salience and the deletion of its pronunciation in some phonetic environments, also made it a major challenge to students In addition, the students’ difficulties in pronouncing the morpheme –ed resulted from the linguistic

differences between Vietnamese and English, as well astheir limited exposure to English, which lowered the salience of all three allomorphs to them As a result, the students encountered great difficulties in producing the past tense morpheme –ed orally This led

to the fact that they mostly relied on pragmatic means and lexical means when expressing the temporality in the past, which might adversely affect their speaking performance and general communication

This study could help gain more insights into the impacts of the shadowing

technique on students’ oral production of the past tense morpheme Considering the benefits of the shadowing technique and Vietnamese learners’ difficulty in the

pronunciation of –ed, this study was conducted with the participation of seventh graders

at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School in order to gain more insights into the impacts of the

shadowing technique on students’ oral production of the past tense morpheme

1.3 Research questions

The study aimed to investigate the impacts of shadowing technique on oral

production of the past tense morpheme with the participation of Vietnamese grade students at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School The research questions that guided the study were:

seventh-1 Does the use of shadowing technique have an effect on the oral production of the past tense allomorphs /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/?

2 Does the use of shadowing technique facilitate the participants’ developmental phases in the expression of temporality?

In line with the aforementioned research questions, the following hypotheses were formulated:

1 Ho: The use of shadowing technique has no effect on the oral production of the past tense allomorphs /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/

Ha: The use of shadowing technique has an effect on the oral production of the past tense allomorphs /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/

2 Ho: The use of shadowing technique does not facilitate the participants’

developmental phases in the expression of temporality

Ha: The use of shadowing technique facilitates the participants’ developmental phases in the expression of temporality

1.4 Significance of the study

This study on the impacts of shadowing technique on oral production of the past tense morpheme offered several useful insights into the use and the benefits of this

technique First, although the accurate pronunciation of inflectional morphemes has been considered as a part of high level of language proficiency, many teachers still find it challenging to teach pronunciation in general and the simple past morpheme –ed in

particular In an attempt to deal with this challenge, this study aimed to investigate the effect of shadowing on learners’ oral production of the simple past morpheme Second, despite its numerous beneficial effects on improving listening and speaking skills,

shadowing has not been fully studied in the context of Vietnam, and therefore may cause confusion or misunderstanding for teachers when applying this technique in their

teaching practices For this reason, this study was conducted to provide more useful insights into the application of shadowing technique to English teaching and learning practices Last but not least, most studies on shadowing were conducted on high school and tertiary students, leaving a scant investigation into the effects of this technique on students at other levels of education Thus, the participation of seven graders in this study could contribute to how the use of shadowing technique can affect students of different proficiency levels

1.5 Definitions of terms

Morpheme

According to Richards and Schmidt (2010), a morpheme is “the smallest

meaningful unit in a language” (p.375), which means that the division of a morpheme can destroy its actual meaning English morphemes are categorized into two types: free

morphemes and bound morphemes While the former has individual meaning and

therefore can be formed independently, the latter cannot stand alone but must be

accompanied by other morphemes For example, play is a free morpheme, while the prefix re– and the suffix –ed in the word replayed are bound morphemes

The simple past tense

The simple past tense is used to describe complete actions, states, or events that happened and ended in the past The past regular and irregular verb forms are employed

to denote the simple past, regardless of persons and numbers (Larsen-Freeman et al., 2016) In this study, the focus is on the use of regular verbs in simple past form

The past tense morpheme

In English, in addition to time expressions, the inflectional morpheme –ed is added

to regular verbs in order to indicate a complete action, state or event happening in the past The morpheme –ed has three variant phonemic forms, known as allomorphs,

including /ɪd/, /t/, and /d/ The pronunciation of the past tense morpheme depends on the final phoneme of the regular verb

The shadowing technique

According to Lambert (1992), shadowing is “a paced, auditory tracking task which involves the immediate vocalization of auditorily presented stimuli” (p 266) In other words, learners repeat what they hear in a clear and accurate way without delay

Shadowing was first introduced in cognitive psychology and later was used as a

technique in teaching interpretation In recent years, shadowing has been considered to be effective in improving learners’ speaking and listening skills During its development, there have been several varieties of shadowing, each of which is relatively different from each other in terms of procedures and benefits In this study, the treatment involved the

use of three shadowing varieties, namely mumbling, parallel reading and complete

shadowing

1.6 Scope of the study

The focus of this study was on the impacts of the use of shadowing technique on the oral production of the past tense morpheme, not on other components of

pronunciation or speaking skills The study was conducted on seventh graders at Thuc Hanh Sai Gon School because of the availability of the sample as well as the limitedresearch on the effects of shadowing technique on learners of low proficiency in

Vietnam

1.7 Chapter summary

In this chapter, the background to this study was presented First of all, the

researcher discussed the current status of English as a lingua franca and English teaching

in the context of Vietnam The researcher continued to mention the difficulties that

Vietnamese learners of English faced when practicing speaking skills in general and pronunciation in particular The oral production of inflectional morpheme was mentioned

as a major challenge to Vietnamese learners, especially the past tense morpheme due to several reasons After that, the shadowing technique was introduced as an effective

technique in developing learners’ speaking and listening skills, and the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme The researcher then presented the rationale for the study, the research questions and the significance of the study The definitions of terms, including the simple past tense, the past tense morpheme and the shadowing technique, were also presented

1.8 Organization of the study

This study consisted of five chapters In the first chapter, the researcher made an introduction to the study, including the background, the rationale, the research questions and hypotheses, definitions of terms, the scope of the study, the summary of the chapter, and the organization of the study

In the second chapter, the literature on the past tense morpheme and the shadowing technique was reviewed In particular, the researcher discussed the role of the past tense morpheme in English proficiency, and explained the reasons why its pronunciation

remains one of the major challenges to learners, especially Vietnamese students The researcher then introduced the shadowing technique, including its definitions and

varieties, the differences between shadowing and repetition, as well as its challenging features and benefits Previous studies on the effects of shadowing on L2 pronunciation were also reviewed, followed by the summary of the chapter

In the third chapter, the researcher presented the methodology of the study To be specific, the descriptions of the study design, the research setting, the population and sample, the instruments, the procedures of the study as well as the data analysis were described in this chapter

In the fourth chapter, the researcher presented the findings of the study A detailed discussion based on the findings was also included

In the fifth chapter, the whole study was summarized Conclusions of the study were also drawn, followed by the limitations of the study Finally, the researcher made

some recommendations for further research

Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 The regular simple past tense morpheme

2.1.1 Developmental phases in the expression of the past

Temporality is of great importance in every human language and expressed

through a variety of devices To be specific, speakers of a language can express the

temporal location of an event or situation with the use of lexical, pragmatic, syntactic or morphological means, or a combination of several means at a time (Klein et al., 1993) While some languages do not have grammatical devices to denote tense and aspect, there are clear rules for the use of morphological means in English (Klein et al., 1993) For example, in the expression of the past, the regular and irregular past tense inflections are consistently employed in addition to connectives as well as temporal and locative

adverbials

The use of different means to express the past does not occur at the same time, but tends to follow developmental stages In his study on learners’ acquisition of temporality, Meisel (1987, as cited in Bardovi-Harlig, 1992) established a developmental order of expressing reference to the past with four stages In particular, after the first stage in which no reference is used explicitly, learners move on to express the past time with the exclusive use of adverbials They then enter the third stage in which verbal morphemes are employed, although unsystematically Finally, using these morphemes systematically indicates that learners are in the fourth stage of the development Schumann (1987)

agreed with the developmental order established by Meisel (1987), although he merged the first two stages into one, resulting in a three-stage order Following Meisel (1987) and Schumann (1987), Bardovi-Harlig (2000) and Ortega (2009) also divided the ability to express temporality of the past into 3 phases, as presented in Table 2.1 below

Table 2.1

Three Broad Developmental Phases in Terms of Temporality Expression by

Ortega (2009)

Phase 1: Pragmatic means he go to the bus stop / and wait for the bus

Phase 2: Lexical means then his friend go past / so she give him a

lift / next they go to the airport Phase 3: Morphological

means

and suddenly the car broke down / and later he took a taxi to the airport

At the earliest developmental phase, learners do not utilize tense-aspect

morphology to express the temporality Instead of that, they completely rely on pragmatic means to denote temporality, such as using scaffolding provided by interlocutors and/or describing the situation in chronological order (Ortega, 2009) In phase 2, temporality is expressed with lexical means including “temporal and locative adverbials (e.g in the evening; now; then; here; there, etc.); connectives (e.g and; and then; while; whereas, etc.); calendaric references (e.g January, 15), nouns (e.g Monday) and verbs (e.g start; finish) (Gotseva, 2017, p.180) It should be noted that the verbs employed in this phase still remain in base form, or a product of learners’ interlanguage that cannot be found in either their mother tongue or the target language In the third phase, in addition to lexical means, morphological means are systematically employed to mark the tense and aspect of the verbs and indicate temporality In other words, to determine which of the three

developmental phases learners belong to depends on the types of means that they employ

to express temporality However, the three phases in the development of expressing temporality are broad and therefore allow little detailed analysis of learning progress In

an attempt to closely investigate the students’ development, this study divided the third phase into two sub stages, namely the early stage of phase 3 and phase 3 To be more specific, students who were classified as the early stage of phase 3 were partially

successful in using the morpheme –ed, reaching at least 30% of the obligatory contexts, but they were not able to meet the criterion for acquiring the past tense morpheme

established by Lahey et al (1992), which was set at 80% of the obligatory contexts in this study Meanwhile, students who fulfilled the criterion for morpheme acquisition were grouped as phase 3

The expression of tense and aspect with the use of morphological markers is

considered evidence of learners’ syntactic and semantic competence, and therefore plays

an important role in developing their L2 proficiency (Gotseva, 2017) However, learners are likely to encounter great difficulty in employing tense marking to express

temporality In particular, the use of the past morpheme remains a major challenge to learners, especially those whose mother tongue does not employ morphological means to denote tense and aspect In the next part, the reasons for the challenging features of the past tense morpheme are discussed in more detail

2.1.2 The problematic oral production of the past morpheme –ed

In addition to lexical means, grammatical morphemes are employed to express tense and aspect in English For example, in order to denote actions that happened in the past, the morpheme –ed is added to the base form of regular verbs without changing the stem (Lotfie et al., 2017) Although the formation of regular past form is not complex, the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme is regarded as a major challenge to learners of English, especially those whose mother tongue is not an inflected language and does not contain consonant clusters To be specific, the past tense morpheme has three allomorphs, which are defined as variant ways of pronouncing a morpheme (Richards & Schmidt, 2010) The phonological form of the past tense morpheme is determined depending on the final sound of the verb, as presented in table 2.2 below

Table 2.2

Three Allomorphs of the Regular Past Morpheme

Allomorphs Final sounds of the base verbs Examples

/d/ voiced sounds, except for /d/ played, changed, allowed

The use of the inflectional morphemes has been a challenge to English learners, and consequently these inflections are often left out The inflectional morpheme of

simple past tense is a prime example in this case There are various reasons for the

omission of the past morpheme –ed

First, empirical studies that were conducted on both L1 and L2 learners of English have revealed that the past tense morpheme is acquired relatively late in comparison with other grammatical morphemes In terms of morpheme acquisition of L1 learners, Brown (1973) carried out a longitudinal study on three children, and established the acquisition order of 14 morphemes, as presented in table 2.3 below

Table 2.3

The Order of English Morpheme Acquisition of L1 Learners by Brown (1973)

1 Present Progressive She is cooking

5 irregular past tense see – saw

7 uncontractible copula Here you are

9 regular past tense I walked to school yesterday

10 3rd person regular present He likes reading books

11 3rd person irregular have – has

12 uncontractible auxiliary He was singing

13 contractible copula She’s smart

14 contractible auxiliary They’re dancing

Based on the study conducted by Brown (1973), a number of studies on the order

of morpheme acquisition have been conducted to examine the order of English

morpheme acquisition by learners from various L1 backgrounds The results of some studies are summarized in table 2.4 below

Mace-Matluck (1979)

Shirahata (1988)

learners are likely to employ lexical means to deal with meaning before they utilize

grammatical items (Gotseva, 2017) In other words, they tend to rely on time adverbial phrases instead of verb markings to convey the past reference (Bell, Trofimovich, &

Collins, 2015) Consequently, learners have difficulty with the consistent production of this morpheme both in written form and oral communication

Second, the low frequency of regular verbs compared to irregular verbs may

reduce learners’ likelihood of experience with their past form To be specific, among the total of 100 most common verbs compiled by Rundell and Fox (2002), only 44 verbs are regular In addition, the interrogative and negative forms of past simple employ the

auxiliary verb didn’t, leaving the main verb in base form This, again, lowers the salience

of regular past morpheme, and consequently causes adverse effects on learners’

acquisition

Third, the pronunciation of the past morpheme –ed is not always the same in different phonological environments, but depends on the final sound of the base verb The variant pronunciation of the past tense morpheme includes three allomorphs, which

can be divided into two types: the syllabic /ɪd/, as in wanted, and the non-syllabic /t / and /d/, as in hoped and played respectively According to Perceptual Salience Hypothesis,

the syllabic suffix is lower in terms of difficulty level compared to the non-syllabic one,

as “a syllable is more perceptually salient than a consonant” (Klein et al., 2003, p.3) Solt

et al (2004) also agree that the non-syllabic allomorphs are less sonorous and therefore less salient than the syllabic ones Empirical research that investigated the Perceptual Salience Hypothesis on the allomorphic variants of the past tense morpheme suggested that learners from various L1 backgrounds are likely to perceive and pronounce the

allomorph /ɪd/ better than its counterparts /t/ and /d/ (Wolfram, 1989; Wolfram &

Hatfield, 1986; Davila, 2018; Dwight, 2012; Lotfie et al., 2017) In other words, the syllabic allomorphs /t/ and /d/ are more problematic for learners of English in comparison with the syllabic /ɪd/ It can be seen that despite the transparent rules for formation of the regular past form, the phonological complexity of the past tense morpheme makes it remain a major challenge in English mastery, and the three allomorphs of –ed have

non-variant levels of difficulty to learners of English

The fourth reason for learners’ difficulty in producing the morpheme –ed is the deletion of its pronunciation in some phonetic environments for the sake of articulation

with ease (Bell, Trofimovich, & Collins, 2015) In fact, the addition of –ed to regular

verbs often creates consonant clusters, such as jumped / dʒʌmpt/ and changed /tʃeɪndʒd/

The discomfort associated with pronouncing these clusters, especially when they are

followed by another consonant (for example, jumped down / dʒʌmpt daʊn/ and changed back /tʃeɪndʒd bæk/, increases the likelihood of speakers’ reduction of the –ed allomorph

The deletion of –ed pronunciation in complex codas has made this morpheme less salient

to English learners, resulting in the fact that they “simply do not consistently produce what they do not consistently perceive” (Solt et al., 2004, p 10)

2.1.3 The reasons for difficulties in producing the morpheme –ed encountered by Vietnamese learners of English

The difficulties in producing the morpheme –ed encountered by English learners are also prevalent among Vietnamese students In addition to the reasons mentioned above, there are several specific causes of the past tense morpheme being an acute

problem for Vietnamese learners To begin with, the fact that Vietnam is not an speaking country has reduced Vietnamese learners’ exposure to the target language in general and the regular past morpheme in particular As a consequence, the limited

English-exposure to English lowers the salience of all three allomorphs to Vietnamese learners, and therefore causes adverse effects on their perception and production of the English past tense morpheme

Furthermore, the fundamental linguistic differences between Vietnamese and English have caused Vietnamese learners’ difficulties in producing the past tense

morpheme First, in terms of expressing temporality, verbal affixes are used to denote tense in English, while Vietnamese speakers mostly depend on temporal adverbials, or

employs particles such as đã, đang and sẽ in front of the main verbs (Ngo, 2015) As a

consequence, Vietnamese learners are likely to make mistakes in using appropriate verb forms due to the influence of their L1 knowledge Second, the disparity in sound systems

of the two languages also causes great difficulty in pronunciation for Vietnamese

learners To be specific, because there is a limited number of final consonants and no consonant clusters in their mother tongue, Vietnamese learners are foreign to the

pronunciation of the English past tense morpheme, especially its allomorphs /t/ and /d/, which often form complex codas in several phonetic environments As a result, learners tend to leave out these two allomorphs, especially when they appear in complex codas (Wolfram, 1985) For these reasons, Vietnamese students often face significant

challenges in pronouncing the regular past form in English

The low salience of the past tense morpheme owing to the status of English as a foreign language in Vietnam, as well as the differences in sound systems and expressing temporality between the two languages have significantly contributed to Vietnamese learners’ inconsistent use of the morpheme –ed In order to deal with this problem,

researchers and educators have investigated various approaches and techniques that can help Vietnamese students produce the morpheme –ed more effectively Some useful techniques, such as drilling and color-coding, have been proved to help learners improve their pronunciation of the past tense morpheme (Marchena et al., 2020) However, there

is still a great demand for further research on effective techniques to develop learners’ perception and production of –ed

2.2 Shadowing technique

2.2.1 The definition and history of shadowing technique

Since the introduction of shadowing, researchers have defined this technique in several ways Lambert (1989) defined shadowing as “a paced, auditory tracking task which involves the immediate vocalization of auditorily presented stimuli, that is, word-for-word repetition, in the same language” (p 154) In other words, shadowers try to reproduce what they hear immediately and as accurately as possible Later, Zakeri (2014) emphasized the cognitive aspect of the definition of shadowing, considering it as “an active and highly cognitive activity in which learners track the heard speech and vocalize

it as clearly as possible at the same time that they hear it” (p.21) In this regard,

shadowing practice involves the use of working memory, as learners have to memorize the incoming sounds in order to reproduce them Based on the definitions of shadowing

by Lambert (1989) and Zakeri (2014), shadowing can be defined as a technique that

involves students in a cognitive activity in which they are required to repeat the speech input with little delay and reproduce it as accurately as possible

Although shadowing now is well-known as a teaching technique that mainly helps learners improve their speaking and listening skills, it did not have its origin in language education In fact, shadowing was first introduced in the 1950s in the field of cognitive psychology to study selective attention (Lambert, 1989) Later, shadowing was

commonly applied to interpretation teaching practices as well The reason for the use of shadowing in interpretation institutes lies in the fact that beginner interpreters should learn how to listen and speak concurrently in either their mother tongue or the target language before they move on to translating Besides that, shadowing is also used in treatment of stuttering (Li- Chi, 2009, as cited in Foote & McDonough, 2017) It was not until the 1990s that shadowing was developed into a teaching technique in EFL contexts (Tamai, 1992) Gradually, this technique has been widely used in Asian countries,

especially Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia

Over the time, shadowing has developed into several varieties, depending on how

or when it is practiced by learners during their learning process Many researchers have defined numerous variant forms of shadowing, some of which overlap in their

procedures For example, full shadowing (Kurata, 2007), phonemic shadowing (Norman, 1976) and complete shadowing (Murphey, 2001) actually share the same procedure in which learners have to repeat all the words that they hear In table 2.5 below, some

popular varieties of shadowing and their procedures are summarized by Hamada (2016)

Table 2.5

Varieties of Shadowing by Hamada (2016)

Complete shadowing Learners shadow everything speakers say

Selective shadowing Learners select only certain words and phrases to

shadow

Parallel reading Learners shadow while reading the text

Content shadowing Learners concentrate on both shadowing and the

meaning

Mumbling Learners silently shadow the incoming sounds without

text

Interactive shadowing Selective shadowing, and adds questions and comments

to make it more natural and show more involvement on the part of the learners

Conversational

shadowing

Learners repeat conversation partner’s words

Phrase shadowing Learners shadow phrase by phrase with a slight delay Phonemic shadowing Learners shadow each sound as soon as they hear

The varieties of shadowing technique are different in their ways of practice and serve variant purposes For example, in complete shadowing or phonemic shadowing, learners have to reproduce all the words they hear, which means they have to focus their attention on the phonological feature of the aural stimuli, and therefore are unlikely to have enough cognitive resources to process the content On the other hand, when

practicing selective shadowing, learners need to analyze the speech semantically and syntactically in order to select what to reproduce from the speech input (Hamada, 2018b)

As a result, it is important that learners reach a certain level of proficiency in order to practice selective shadowing, and this variety of shadowing helps them improve their ability to perceive phonemes and recognize words as well Mumbling is similar to

complete shadowing, although students who practice the former tend to shadow more quietly Thus, mumbling is recommended to use when learners are foreign to shadowing

in order to increase their confidence in practicing this technique, or when they do not want to disturb other students, especially in a large-sized class (Hamada, 2016) Due to the variety of shadowing variations as well as their variant benefits, there is no fixed practice of shadowing (Hamada, 2012) Teachers may use one variety solely or a

combination of varieties depending on the focus of their lessons and their students’ level

of proficiency

Depending on when shadowing is implemented in teaching procedures, this

technique can be divided into two types: pre-shadowing and post-shadowing The former

is also known as bottom-up shadowing, while the latter can refer to top-down shadowing (Kadota, 2012, as cited in Hamada, 2014) To be specific, pre-shadowing is practiced before students learn the content of the lesson This type of shadowing is beneficial for students in terms of speech perception, because they attentively repeat what they hear instead of concentrating on other aspects of the speech (Hamada, 2014) Nevertheless, pre-shadowing can be challenging and may cause cognitive overload to students,

especially those at low proficiency level or when the lesson content is quite unfamiliar to them On the other hand, post-shadowing takes place after students have learned all the vocabulary items and grammatical structures included in the speech input Although this means students have to share their attention between the phonological aspect and the content of the input, post-shadowing is likely to help students become less anxious when practicing this technique, and to reinforce their lexical and grammatical knowledge

(Hamada, 2011b) Considering the beneficial effects of the two types of shadowing, Hamada (2014) suggested that teachers should include both pre-shadowing and post-shadowing in their teaching practices by allowing students to use scripts during some steps of shadowing procedure In other words, pre-shadowing and post-shadowing can overlap each other at certain point in the teaching procedure so that students can take full advantage of both types

Another type of shadowing that was recently developed by Hamada (2018a) is International Phonetic Alphabet Shadowing (IPA shadowing) Learners who practice this variation of shadowing are provided with transcripts that was written in IPA In this way, they can shadow with the assistance of IPA scripts, which can help them practice

shadowing in a less challenging way as well as reduce the likelihood of splitting their attention between phonemic, semantic and syntactic features of the aural stimuli IPA shadowing, therefore, can address the shortcomings of complete shadowing and parallel reading However, it is important that students should be able to recognize and pronounce every IPA before practicing IPA shadowing

2.2.2 The differences between shadowing and repetition

One of the most common reasons for which many educators object to shadowing lies in its similarity to repetition to some extent At first glance, both techniques require learners to repeat the speech input as exactly as possible However, psycholinguistics states that there is a cognitive distinction between shadowing and repetition To be

specific, shadowing is considered as an “online immediate process of repeating speech” (Shiki et al., 2010, p.82) It means that learners have to shadow the incoming sounds with

no or little delay On the other hand, in repetition activities, the speech input is

temporarily stopped so that students can repeat the phrases or sentences off-line (Shiki et al., 2010) Due to these pauses, learners can have enough time to attend to the grammar

or content of the speech (Hamada, 2016, p.6) In other words, when learners practice repetition, their process of the speech input takes place in both semantic and syntactic way (Shiki et al., 2010) As a result, repetition can be used as a reinforcement activity that helps learners to internalize what they have learned to their long-term memory

However, learners practicing repetition tend to distribute their attention to semantic and syntactic aspects of the speech instead of fully focusing on recognizing and repeating the incoming sounds, and they have to exploit their short-term memory to memorize each chunk as well as its pronunciation (Hsieh et al., 2013) Consequently, they are less

phonologically sensitive compared to those who practice shadowing (Shiki et al., 2010) For this reason, practicing repetition is less likely to help learners develop their bottom-

up skills and phoneme perception process in comparison with shadowing technique

2.2.3 The challenging features of shadowing technique

The fact that shadowing makes cognitive demands on learners makes it a relatively challenging technique to practice Learners who are not familiar with shadowing may encounter great difficulties in practicing this technique, especially those who are not used

to performing multi tasks (Hsieh et al., 2013) As shadowing requires learners to listen to the speech input and repeat it at the same time, they have to employ their working

memory to memorize the incoming sounds and reproduce them simultaneously At the

same time, shadowers also need to listen to their own output to make sure that they

reproduce the input accurately, especially when shadowing is used for improving

speaking skills In this regard, shadowing requires more cognitive load than a listening activity does, and therefore may cause overload to learners, especially those at beginning level (Chung, 2010)

In addition, the similar features of shadowing to other techniques, namely chorus reading, as well as its numerous varieties, may result in misconception and confusion for both teachers and learners (Arthurson, 2019b) This can lead to improper application of the technique, and therefore causes unexpected results as well as demotivation for

learners Moreover, the repetitive feature of shadowing makes it sound less interesting to learners in comparison with other learning techniques (Li-Chi, 2009, as cited in Foote & McDonough, 2017), and consequently requires a lot of effort and learner autonomy

In order to overcome these challenges, teachers are advised to follow the

suggestions below when applying shadowing to their teaching practice

The first and foremost requirement of shadowing is that teachers are fully aware of what they use shadowing for When shadowing is implemented to sharpen listening skills, learners concentrate on the sounds they hear On the other hand, when they shadow with the purpose of improving their speaking skills, they have to pay attention not only to the incoming sounds but also to their pronunciation of the words In other words, they are required to identify the sounds, repeat them and then check whether they pronounce the word similarly In order to accomplish these requirements at the same time, learners should reach a sufficient level of phoneme perception (Hamada, 2018c) If learners are still slow at recognizing the incoming sounds, shadowing may not produce much effect and can even lead to demotivation since learners find the technique too challenging and impossible to accomplish For this reason, teachers should be acutely aware of students’ level of proficiency before making a decision on applying shadowing In addition, it is strongly advised that students be well informed about the nature and benefits of

shadowing so that they can remain motivated when practicing this technique

Secondly, the use of scripts in shadowing practices should be considered carefully

In general, learners are not likely to be allowed to use scripts when shadowing in order to prevent them from paying attention to the meaning of the words rather than its

phonological features (Hamada, 2018c) However, shadowing without any aid may

increase the level of anxiety of low proficiency learners or those who are not familiar with this technique For this reason, it is advisable that students grasp the meaning of the text before they shadow it (Hamada, 2018c) It is also suggested that teachers should let learners shadow the scripts after following the listening teaching procedure instead of reading them in silence (Kuramoto & Matsumura, 2001, as cited in Hamada, 2014) This allows them to concentrate on repeating the incoming sounds rather than being distracted

by analyzing the content Otherwise, it may overburden students’ cognition and therefore make shadowing become too challenging for them

Thirdly, it is advisable that the implementation of shadowing take place in an intensive way, but should not last for a long time Although shadowing has a number of beneficial effects, its challenging feature can gradually demotivate students, and therefore makes it hard for them to keep practicing this technique properly In fact, a one-month application of shadowing with approximately 30 minutes of practice per week is enough for students to reap significant benefits of shadowing (Hamada, 2016)

Last but not least, Shiki, Mori, Kadota and Yoshida (2010) point out that repeating each text five or six times is enough and after that students should move on with a new one To be specific, shadowing a speech input for more than six times is unnecessary because the performances of students have reached the ceiling point (Hamada, 2018c) In addition, shadowing the same material excessively can result in boredom and

demotivation, which may lead to improper practice of the technique as well as adversely affect students’ attitudes towards learning

2.2.4 The benefits of shadowing

Despite the demanding features of shadowing, the implementation of this

technique can benefit students in numerous aspects, including not only their listening and speaking skills, but also their psychology and working memory

First of all, shadowing can greatly contribute to improving learners’ listening skills As shadowers are required to listen to the heard speech and repeat it at the same time, their attention mainly focuses on the incoming sounds rather than the meaning (Hamada, 2018c) They have to listen attentively to the sounds and try to reproduce them

as accurately as possible As a result, learners can become better at recognizing the

sounds, and therefore enhance their perception of phonemes and their bottom-up skills (Hamada, 2016, 2018c) In this regard, shadowing is especially beneficial to students who are not familiar with the target language’s sound system (Hamada, 2015a) Furthermore, because learners have to track the speech input closely when practicing shadowing, they can become more familiar with listening at natural speaking speed, and consequently improve their listening ability (Hamada, 2016) In addition, as shadowers not only imitate the sounds themselves, but also follow the suprasegmental features of the speech, they gradually get used to English speakers’ intonation and stress, which greatly contributes to their listening comprehension (Chung, 2010)

Second, shadowing also helps learners with their speaking skills by improving their pronunciation, fluency and intonation (Hsieh et al., 2013; Foote & McDonough, 2017; Hamada, 2018c) To be specific, as learners need to repeat what they hear

simultaneously and as accurately as possible, their mouth muscles are trained in an

unconscious manner As a result, they become better at producing the sounds, especially those which do not exist in their native language In other words, the practice of

shadowing helps learners improve their pronunciation, which greatly contributes to their speaking performance Additionally, as learners are required to reproduce the speech input simultaneously and accurately when shadowing, the practice of this technique can help them develop native-like intonation and increase their articulation rate as well as fluency (Hsieh et al., 2013; Zakeri, 2014; Kadota, 2019)

Third, shadowing has been proven to produce beneficial effects on learners’

psychology When shadowing is conducted as a learning activity in the classroom,

learners have to repeat the texts aloud in front of their teachers and fellow students This helps learners become less anxious as they use the target language outside the classroom

(Sumiyoshi & Seventant, 2017) In addition, instead of passively receiving the text

aurally, learners take more control of the text when shadowing, which gives them an opportunity to join in the learning process more actively (Arthurson, 2019b) As a result, they become more motivated and are more likely to make progress in their learning

Last but not least, empirical research has showed that learners can improve their working memory through the practice of shadowing (Takeuchi et al 2021) When

learners shadow, what they hear is first attended to and then stored in the phonological loop, a component of working memory (Baddley, 2018), before being articulated As shadowing requires learners to reproduce the speech input simultaneously, practicing this technique can help increase their articulation rate, which is a decisive factor in short-term memory (Miyake, 2009) In other words, with the practice of shadowing, learners can gradually retain more information in their phonological loop at a time, increase their articulation rate and consequently improve their working memory

2.2.5 The applicability of shadowing

Thanks to significant developments in the technological field, shadowing can be performed not only in class but also outside the classroom Authentic learning materials

of different levels are abundantly available on the Internet, and mobile recording

applications which can be used to record students’ shadowing practice are provided for free or at a reasonable price The accessibility of materials and useful tools for shadowing allows learners to easily practice the technique themselves This offers learners,

especially those who have difficulty in accessing formal education, more chances to practice their speaking and listening skills at an affordable expense (Foote &

McDonough, 2017)

One of the most considerable contributions of shadowing to learners’ language achievement is that it is adaptable to various learning contexts and suitable for learners of different levels of proficiency (Arthurson, 2019b) In addition to textbooks and reference books, the abundant resources on the Internet allows teachers to choose appropriate

materials for their learners, or adapt them depending on learners’ interests, needs and levels Moreover, shadowing can be integrated into classroom activities, or conveniently conducted at home thanks to technological advances To be specific, after receiving detailed instructions on how to shadow properly, learners are able to practice shadowing

at their own pace everywhere and at any time, which increases their autonomy and helps them make better progress in their learning It is also advisable for learners to record what they shadow and send the recordings to their teachers in order to receive feedback on further improvements

2.3 Previous studies on the shadowing technique

The shadowing technique has been widely researched in Asian countries such as Japan and Indonesia A number of empirical studies have been carried out and proven the effectiveness of shadowing in improving students’ listening skills (Hamada, 2009, 2014; Masumoto, 2014; Sumarsih, 2017; Fatimah, 2017; Jingga, 2019; Ekayati, 2020) and working memory (Takeuchi et al., 2021) Although the effectiveness of shadowing in improving listening skills has been fully investigated by a number of studies, its impacts

on L2 learners’ pronunciation still require more empirical research (Hamada, 2018a)

Pronunciation is an important component that greatly contributes to learners’ speaking performance In order to improve their pronunciation, learners first acquire the differences between the sounds of the target language, especially those which their

mother tongue does not have, and then try to produce them orally Thus, teaching L2 pronunciation involves teaching not only receptive skills but also productive skills

(Jarosz, 2019) According to Kelly (2000), the use of drills, such as choral drilling,

individual repetition and chaining, can help learners develop both receptive and

productive skills Another study carried out by Trofimovich and Gatbonton (2006) also

proved that L2 pronunciation can measurably improve through repetition and the on-form Additionally, Marchena, Vargas and Sánchez (2020) stated that learners made improvement in their verbal production of the past tense morpheme after practicing

focus-drilling and color coding

Due to its similar features to repetition, shadowing technique is expected to be potentially effective in improving learners’ pronunciation One study that focused on the effects of shadowing on pronunciation was conducted by Foote & McDonough (2017) The study involved 22 English adult learners from 5 L1 backgrounds The treatment lasted for 8 weeks, with the participants spending at least 40 minutes per week on

shadowing short conversations The results from pre-test, mid-test and post-test showed that the participants made significant improvement in terms of imitation of the speech, comprehensibility and fluency Although this study has greatly contributed to insights into the effects of shadowing on pronunciation, the fact that the participants were

university students in Canada, an English-speaking country, and that the sample was small limit the generalizability of the results to learners of different levels and learning environments

In line with the result of the study by Foote and McDonough, Zakeri (2014) also researched the impacts of shadowing on learners’ fluency His study included 40 adult learners of English who were randomly divided into a control group and an experimental group The participants in the experimental group shadowed their listening and reading materials, and also practiced shadowing at home, while those in the control group

followed normal learning procedures After one month, all participants took a speaking test in which they had to discuss a question The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of fluency This study has proved the beneficial effects of shadowing on the components of speaking skills However, the procedure of shadowing, the materials as well as the grading process were not mentioned

in detail, which made the results less convincing

With regard to other features of pronunciation, the study conducted by Hsieh et al (2013) showed that shadowing could help improve learners’ intonation, fluency, and

word pronunciation The study adopted pre-test post-test design with the participation of

14 Taiwanese tertiary students who did not major in English Half of the students formed

an experimental group and practiced shadowing, while a repetition technique was used in the control group The results from pre-test and post-test were analyzed with independent sample t-test, which revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group both at segmental and suprasegmental levels However, the sample of this study was relatively small, and the fact that participants were asked to read the texts during the two tests rather than producing their own speech also raised the question about the results

Within the context of Vietnam, there are only a few studies that investigated the use of the shadowing technique on Vietnamese learners The first one is the study

conducted by Arthurson (2019b), who carried out a survey on 59 language instructors at different universities and schools as well as tertiary students who majored in English teaching in order to find out about their opinions toward the use of shadowing technique The participants received instructions on the use of shadowing technique, and then had a chance to experience the shadowing procedure themselves in order to grasp the principles

of this technique After that, they gave feedback on the application of shadowing to

English teaching The results showed that all participants agreed on the beneficial effects

of shadowing technique on students’ language skills, except for writing About 60% of the participants also claimed that they would apply the shadowing technique to their own study Despite the small sample, this survey has confirmed the positive opinions of

Vietnamese language instructors and English-major students on shadowing technique, and paved the way for using this technique in English teaching practices in Vietnam

Pham and Nguyen (2017) carried out a study on how shadowing helped students improve their oral production of the past morpheme 17 tertiary non-English major

students were divided into two groups While group 1 practiced shadowing for the period

of 5 weeks, participants in group 2 only watched videos The results of the pre-test and post-test, which involved students reading the same passage, revealed that students in group 1 outperformed those in group 2 in terms of the accuracy of –ed pronunciation

However, the fact that students were evaluated with the same material might influence the results, as they were possibly able to memorize the correct pronunciation and then recall it in the post-test Although this study has contributed to insights into the effects of shadowing on pronunciation, further improvements can be made with more research including a bigger sample and learners of different proficiency levels

Another study conducted by Nguyen et al (2020) focuses on the effect of

shadowing practices on students’ interpreting performances The study consisted of 54 third-year English-major students who were randomly divided into a control group and an experimental group The results showed a minimal influence of the shadowing technique

on fluency improvement of the experimental group, and their positive attitudes towards the use of shadowing This study has shed light on the application of shadowing to

Vietnamese students However, more empirical research on this technique is needed to investigate its potential effects on other components of speaking skills

2.4 Research gap

As can be seen from previous research, the number of studies investigating the effects of shadowing on learners’ speaking performance is relatively small in comparison with those conducted on listening skills In addition, the sample of these studies were relatively small, and the shadowing procedure that was adopted in each study was not mentioned in detail As a consequence, more empirical research is needed in order to offer more insights into the use of shadowing to improve speaking performance and generalize the impacts of this technique on components of speaking skills Moreover, most researchers have applied shadowing to L2 learners in English-speaking countries (Foote & McDonough, 2017), in Malaysia where English has been accorded as an official second language (Omar & Umehara, 2010) and other Asian countries such as Japan (Hamada, 2011a, 2012, 2014, 2015b, 2016; Shiki et al., 2010; Matsumoto, 2014;

Arthurson, 2019a; Kadota, 2019), Indonesia (Fatimah, 2017; Sumarih, 2017; Jingga, 2019) and Taiwan (Hsieh et al., 2013) In the educational settings of Vietnam, there is still a scant investigation into the effects of shadowing technique on Vietnamese learners’

listening and speaking skills Additionally, the studies on the shadowing technique were mostly carried out with the participation of tertiary students and high school students In particular, the two studies conducted in Vietnam contexts only tested the effectiveness of the shadowing technique on university students Due to the differences in language

teaching contexts and learner characteristics, it is inadvisable to generalize the beneficial effects of the shadowing technique on all students of different levels and educational contexts There should be more empirical research on how the use of the shadowing technique can affect the learning outcomes of students at various proficiency levels and

in different educational settings Furthermore, despite the fact that secondary students have learnt how to use the past simple, they are likely to encounter great difficulty when producing the past tense morpheme orally Since the shadowing technique has been proved to improve learners’ speaking skills in previous research, it is a potential

technique that can help improve secondary students’ pronunciation of –ed Thus, in order

to contribute to the generalization of the beneficial effects of shadowing in general and on pronunciation in particular, as well as considering the difficulties in producing verbal morphology encountered by secondary students, this study investigated the impacts of shadowing technique on the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme in the context of Vietnam In order to help students reap the benefits of shadowing, several varieties of this technique were applied, namely mumbling, parallel reading, complete shadowing As the study was conducted on a large-sized class with low-level students who had no previous experience in shadowing, mumbling and parallel reading were suitable to help increase students’ self-assurance, while complete shadowing offers them an opportunity to

improve their pronunciation of the past tense morpheme as well as their ability to express temporality In other words, the combination of different types of shadowing can help students get familiar with practicing this technique, lessen their anxiety and allow them to reap the benefits of shadowing at the same time

In order to investigate the impacts of shadowing on low-level students’

pronunciation of the morpheme –ed, the study was conducted on seven graders at a

secondary school in an attempt to answer the first research question “Does the use of

shadowing technique have an effect on the oral production of the past tense allomorphs /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/?” In addition, as the accurate use of morphological means is a criterion for determining the developmental phases in expressing temporality, this study also

sought to answer the second question “Does the use of shadowing technique facilitate the participants’ developmental phases in the expression of temporality?”

2.5 Chapter summary

In this chapter, the review of background information related to the research topic was presented for deeper comprehension of the study The chapter reviewed the literature on developmental phases in expressing temporality, the past tense morpheme and its challenging features to L2 learners The definition and benefits of the shadowing technique was also thoroughly reviewed Finally, the chapter presented a number of previous studies on the shadowing technique, and then pointed out the research gap