Abstract
Since the influence of audiovisual materials on shadowing performance has not yet been studied well, this study compared the effects of two types of materials—auditory texts presented together with either a still or moving image of a face of a speaker who was reading the text aloud—on shadowing reproduction rates and loci of eye-gaze of learners. Twenty-four L1-Japanese learners of English (13 upper-level and 11 lower-level learners) participated in an eye-tracking experiment. In the results, the participants shadowed more accurately for moving images of a speaker’s face than for still images; when the moving images were presented, the lower-proficiency level group gazed at the speaker’s mouth longer than any other region, but the upper-proficiency level group gazed at the eyes and mouth equally longer than the other facial regions. The reproduction rates did not statistically differ between the eyes and mouth in the lower-proficiency group, but the upper-proficiency group exhibited better reproduction rates for the eyes compared to the mouth. On the one hand visual cues, such as movements of mouth and chin of a speaker’s face, help some learners perceive auditorily presented texts, and on the other hand some learners may have difficulty in linking speech sounds and mouth movements during shadowing.
