Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) has been widely discussed in the filed of language teaching. In the field of English language arts, oral reading is used as an indicator of reading competence. ORF requires many aspects of reading competence such as word recognition, parsing and prosodic elements such as speed, pause, intonation and prominence. Characteristics of orally less fluent readers include stumbling and making a pause after every word. Their reading obviously shows that they do not understand the content. Therefore, it is hard to understand what learners are trying to convey. Orally fluent readers, on the other hand, can insert pauses at appropriate places, even when they do not know some words in the sentence. Therefore, their reading sounds more natural (Herman 1985, Jenkins 2001, Kibby 2004).
Many methods including reading aloud, repeated reading and shadowing enhance ORF. Shadowing has been known as training for simultaneous interpretation. Shadowing is defined as reading aloud by following a model as closely as possible (Kadota & Tamai 2004). The use of shadowing has also been well discussed not only in ESL but also in FLL. Some studies claim that the shadowing would be an effective method to improve not only listening and speaking, but also reading competence (Someya 1998, Takizawa 2000, Kadota & Tamai 2004, Watanabe 2004).
The study compares shadowing with traditional oral reading training. In both conditions, the structure, meaning and prosody of experimental passages are presented in a lecture format with a model audio recording. The only difference between the two conditions is the type of training given to learners. In this paper the author presents interim findings of the study which examines whether or not shadowing enhances learners' ORF.