Japanese Shadowing Training Using Synchronized Partial Captions

Shadowing is a language practice method where a learner listens to a native speaker's speech and speaks the same content immediately. Speech shadowing is a popular languagelearning technique that is effective for developing listening and speaking skills. This paper proposes using synchronized partial captions (PSC) in the shadowing training. In PSC, the text is synchronized to the speech at the word level, and only selected words are shown in the caption to aid listening comprehension, while the rest are masked to keep the learner listening to the speech. We conducted an experiment where 59 learners exercised shadowing in one of three learning methods: no caption, full caption, and partial caption. The experimental result shows that training in PSC conditions rapidly improves learners' proficiency.