抄録
In the discussion of the effectiveness of the task of shadowing, Kadota (2007,
2012) argues that one of the potential effects of the L2 shadowing training is to
enhance the speed and efficiency of the subvocal rehearsal in the phonological working
memory, and to enhance implicit learning of lexical chunks such as formulaic
sequences.
The experiment to be reported here is an attempt to investigate how shadowing
and listening tasks differently affect the participants' conscious subvocal process in
reading English text silently. Twenty-five participants learning English as a foreign
language (FL) in Japan were instructed to subvocalize (i.e., utter internally) a total of
ten English passages in pre- and post-tests while tracing the lines of the text they were
reading, and their behaviors were all video-recorded. The main result was that there
was a significant increase in conscious subvocalization speed (words-per-minute data,
etc.) in silent reading after the shadowing session, whereas there was not after the
listening session. With this finding, the present research suggests that shadowing may
enhance the L2 learners' subvocal rehearsal efficiency in the phonological working
memory.
