Shadowing has increasingly been recognized as an effective practice for developing listening skills in second language learning. The common claim is that the act of simultaneous listening and speaking activates sub-vocalization in the working memory, which helps improve bottom-up processing (Kadota, 2007). This helps improve morpheme perception that contributes to sound recognition skills leading to listening comprehension (Hamada, 2016). However, there is very little research focusing on the influence of speed variation in shadowing model audio. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of shadowing in relation to gradual speed progression of the model audio and sound recognition ability. Participants in this study were 29 university students who were enrolled in the language courses, Advanced Spoken Japanese (experimental group) and Advanced Japanese (control group) at an Australian university. Shadowing practice was conducted for eight weeks during a 13-week semester. The pre- and post-tests used parts of standardized Japanese proficiency tests for listening comprehension (24 questions) and a dictation test (10 items) for sound recognition ability. The results indicated that the experimental group improved in both listening comprehension and dictation at slow and fast speed, whereas the control group showed improvement only in slow speed dictation.

This study examined university students’ reports of eight achievement emotions in their EFL classes in Mexico. Although anxiety has dominated the research agenda in language learner emotions for decades, second language researchers have begun to examine more recently the role of other emotions. Pekrun’s (2006) framework includes three positive (e.g. hope) and five negative emotions (e.g. shame) that learners might experience in class. These emotions are important because they influence learners’ use of learning strategies and, in turn, performance. In this study, 412 participants (M = 173, F = 239) voluntarily completed an online Spanish version of Pekrun’s (2006) Achievement Emotions Questionnaire, namely the AEQ-Argentine (Sánchez-Rosas, 2015). The results indicated that learners report significantly higher levels of enjoyment, hope, and pride, in their English classes, while three negative emotions: anger, shame, and boredom were rated as highly as anxiety was. No gender differences were found in the eight emotions. However, analyses revealed that two cohorts (low achievers and students in higher semesters) experienced significantly more negative emotions than did high achievers and first-semester students. The importance of understanding how to respond to the negative emotions experienced by these two groups is emphasized.

Many student-teachers in master’s programs in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) desire to learn practical teaching suggestions applicable in their local situations, yet most of their time is spent learning theory with little time spent applying it to local teaching situations, a problem commonly described as the theory/practice gap. While a number of approaches have been proposed to bridge this gap (e.g. Canagarajah, 1999; Kumaravadivelu, 2003), this study reports on an attempt to devise a readily-usable-technique, and accompanying strategy, that can be used to localize theory in a variety of graduate courses designed for classes of in-service teachers in South Korea comprised of both local Korean teachers and visiting native-English speaking teachers. The technique devised was to ask in-service teacher trainees to generate teaching suggestions for their own classrooms that used the theory covered in readings as a springboard for them to create and develop teaching ideas, and the strategy devised to employ this technique was to ask these participants to post a teaching suggestion to a Moodle forum and discuss it with other class participants. Running over a number of years, this study employs a practitioner research method to assess the value of deploying both the technique and strategy. Data from representative examples of student suggestions as well an open-ended survey on student reactions to generating and discussing their teaching suggestions are provided and qualitatively analyzed. It was found that asking in-service teacher-trainees to generate teaching suggestions equipped some of them with a conceptual mode of reading that regularly considered how to creatively adapt ideas from readings for use in their local teaching environments. The activity also helped some participants to become more reflective practitioners and demonstrated to other teachers the value of a community of practice that reflected on how to adapt the content of readings to their local environments.