Recipe: Shadowing
“I want students to listen and repeat sentences.”
The student hears one sentence from your video, the video pauses, they say it, and it plays again or moves on. Your job is to give each sentence a clean start and a clean end.
Recommended video design
- Natural spoken target language, at the speed you would really say it
- One meaningful phrase per sentence
- Clean boundaries: a little quiet before and after
- 2 to 7 seconds per sentence
- Your face and mouth visible when pronunciation matters
You do not need to leave silence for the student
Shadowing Player generates the speaking time itself. It pauses your video after each sentence, for a fixed time the student chooses or for a time that follows the length of the sentence.
Your video
Natural pace, small gaps. This is all you record.
What the student gets
The striped parts are added by the player, not by you.
Why this matters
A watchable video
Five seconds of silence after every sentence makes a video nobody wants to watch straight through.
The right pause for each student
A beginner needs longer than an advanced student. The player lets each one choose.
Splitting the script
Easy to shadow
- I’d like a cup of coffee, please.
- Could you tell me where the station is?
- 주말에 뭐 하세요?
Hard to shadow
- A 15-second sentence with three clauses: split it at the commas
- Half a clause that only makes sense with the next one
- Two speakers talking over each other
What students can do with it
- RepeatHear a sentence 1, 3 or 5 times, or until they stop it.
- Adaptive speaking timeThe pause follows the length of the sentence.
- Speed0.5× to 1.5×, so clean boundaries matter at every speed.
- Favorites and MasteryStudents star hard sentences and mark the ones they know.
Test it the way students will use it
Load your lesson in Shadowing Player on the published video and run these before you share it.
Three speeds
Play a few sentences at 0.75×, 1.0× and 1.25×. A boundary that is fine at one speed can clip at another.
Three repeats in a row
Repeat one sentence three times. Listen for a clipped ending and for the first sound of the next sentence.
Distant random jumps
Turn Random on and step through ten sentences. Each one should start cleanly after a jump from far away.
Twenty recall items
If the lesson is for Recall, do twenty in a row. Check that each prompt and its answer mean the same thing.
Every quiz branch
Choose every answer of every question once. A branch nobody clicked is a branch that may be broken.