Shadowing Practice: How to Speak so That People Want to Listen - Julian Treasure - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Music Thank

you so much, Herb.

Let's talk about talking.

Have a listen to this.

To infinity and beyond!

I'll be back.

You cannot be serious!

You know, you big clown!

Bond.

James Bond.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

And we are ready to lead once more.

Boop, boop, be -doo.

May the force be with you.

Don't!

It's one small step for man.

I have a dream.

The force had all in the time.

Yes, the human voice.

Possibly the most powerful sound on the planet.

It's the only sound that can start a war or say, I love you.

It's the instrument that we all play.

And yet, not an instrument that we're actually taught how to use.

Here are the four communication modes that we use in schools or elsewhere that we're taught to send, to receive.

Two are for the eyes, two are for the ears.

Now, I've presented them here with roughly equal weight, but that's not the way we treat them in school.

It's not the way we treat them in society.

And it's not actually the way we treat them in the digital world very much either.

I think it's rather more like this, isn't it?

When you think about it, it would be a tragedy, a scandal, if a child left school in the UK unable to read or write.

There would be questions in the house.

And yet children are leaving school every single day, unable to speak effectively.

And certainly we never teach children how to listen.

Now, today I'd like to focus on the sending end of this.

Here's a simple model of human communication.

Now, over the last 12 years, as Herb suggested, I've been working with brands, helping them to consider the sound they're making,

because it occurred to me the world is very noisy

and most of that noise is made by organizations who don't think about it.

And I hope we're making a dent in that.

Along the way, what's become clear to me is that we don't think about sound communication very much at all.

And this sending and receiving is not as simple as it appears.

First of all, it all happens in a context which we rarely think about.

And secondly, as I said, we simply don't value oral communication.

We don't teach it very much.

We don't think about it very much.

And if you think about it again,

most of the modern communication protocols that we've invented in the last 20 or 30 years are for the eyes.

Email, text, instant messaging, tweeting.

These are not sound media.

And they do tend to put us into a mode of, as Eddie said earlier, personal broadcasting.

You know, I'm on the train. Who cares?

Really?

This is broadcasting there's not a lot of listening in

that it's not a conversation

and yet for all of you who are actually in the digital domain

and thinking about technology this is going to become increasingly important

there are billions being spent right now on voice recognition

and speech synthesis or is it the other way around i can never remember speech recognition

and voice synthesis possibly we're going to be talking to devices possibly through some sort of a personal avatar

and And conversation is going to come back.

Listening is going to come back.

These things are going to be more important in the future.

There's a lovely sound we're all very familiar with.

Now, I've put up here the simple model.

Actually, what this plays out in in the real world as is ineffective speaking

because we're not taught how to do it to people who are basically not listening very much.

Yeah, I'm listening to you.

I am.

Yeah, you know that one.

I have a whole TED talk about conscious listening.

I'm not going to talk about the listening side today.

I am going to talk about the speaking side and a little bit about the context for it,

which very often is not a room that's set up like this to be perfect.

It's a noisy place with bad acoustics where we're challenged in the sending.

Now, this is important because it affects three things, three marginally important things.

If you care about any of these three things, the ability to express yourself powerfully is very, very significant.

It can affect how well you feel because it's frustrating if you can't get your point across.

A lot of people have the experience of when they're speaking just...

Not being listened to.

What's the most common complaint in relationships?

He or she doesn't listen to me.

So speaking powerfully, we have to take responsibility for.

It's not just the listening.

We'll come back to that.

Let me start with the dark side of the equation.

Things that you might want to pay attention to.

Things that rob you of power in your speaking.

If you lead people or you want to have an influence in the world, these are things you might want to avoid.

And I want to preface this by saying these are not going to be things I suggest you ban from your life.

Maybe one or two of them.

They're just things if you do them a lot, the power gets diminished.

Now, they all come from, I think, four what I call leeches on powerful speaking.

Here are the four leeches.

And these may be things that you recognize, things that you've come across before.

People love these things.

We all love to look good, don't we? and a lot of our talking is actually about looking good, being impressive.

Have you come across people who do, for example, competitive speaking?

I went to Greece this year on holiday.

Oh yeah, I've been to Greece seven times.

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Oh, it's a bit of a joy kill, isn't it?

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That is coming from wanting to look good.

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If there's one thing we adore more than looking good, it's being right.

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and that tends to lead to all sorts of very definitive dogmatic responses.

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People pleasing, saying things in order to be liked and finally fixing.

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A fixer is somebody for whom it's not okay for anybody to be upset.

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Don't cry, don't be upset.

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Let's find a solution.

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Sometimes people need to be upset.

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Now all four of these things come from one emotional base.

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Can you guess what that is?

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I've heard two people say it.

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Absolutely.

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That's where they come from.

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And if your speaking comes out of fear, it does rob you of power.

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And it tends to get expressed in what, in my TED Talk on Powerful Speaking, I called seven deadly sins.

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Now, that is a joke, ladies and gentlemen.

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I'm not saying these are deadly sins.

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And I want to repeat, I'm not saying don't do them.

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I'll try and qualify them for you as I go through

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because I've got a bit more time than I did on that occasion.

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Here's the first of the deadly sins, gossip.

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By gossip, what I mean is speaking ill of somebody who's not present.

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So it's not gossip to say, isn't it lovely, they're getting married.

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No, it's gossip to say, did you see what he was wearing this morning?

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That kind of gossip.

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It's very seductive.

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We all like to indulge in it, but you know perfectly well that

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if you're listening to somebody who's an inveterate gossip the moment

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you walk away who are they going to be gossiping about it's you isn't it now an interesting exercise

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that I could commend to you

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if you want to take it on is to abstain from gossip for a day try a day and

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when you start thinking about it you can't read newspapers

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you can't read magazines you can't enjoy broadcast media at all because a vast amount of what we consume is actually gossip.

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If you made gossip punishable by death the world would be a very quiet place I would like to suggest.

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It's a way of speaking which is seductive and yet not productive

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and if you indulge in it a great deal people won't trust you.

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Then there's judging.

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I don't mean here judgment as in discernment.

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Obviously it's important to discern, to unravel the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff.

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What I mean here is condemning out of hand.

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Have you ever had people around you who are condemnatory the whole time?

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Blaming people, condemning people, dismissing people.

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It can be very tiring to listen to somebody who's like that.

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Third, we have negativity.

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my mother in the last years of her life became

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and sadly very very negative and her worldview was essentially everything's awful

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so I took in a newspaper to her

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and I said oh look it's October the 1st today she said I know isn't it awful well

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if October the 1st is awful what hope have we got really now you may have been around somebody who's

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that negative all the time it's very tiring debilitating to be around

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that I wonder how negative or positive you are in your speaking generally.

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I can't do that.

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No. Is yes the most ready answer or is no?

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Then we have the British national pastime, complaining.

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Now again I want to make this clear.

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If your food is cold in a restaurant, complain.

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You can do something about it.

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I'm talking here about complaining about things we can't do anything about.

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The weather, which we do in this country a great deal of the time.

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The government, the sport.

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If you can do something, do it.

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If you can't do it, complaining is just viral misery let's face it

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and then we have this guy we've all met this guy

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we've all been this guy excuses it wasn't my fault as an alternative to

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that kind of nonsense how about just say sorry

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This is what I'm putting in place to make sure it never happens again.

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Now let's move on.

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That's a clean way to move on when you've made a mistake.

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Excuses just get in the way. And we've got exaggeration.

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Now this could be slight embroidery.

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We do tend to use hyperbole a great deal in our speech.

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Veries and reallys and fantastics.

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As I often say to Americans, how on earth do you describe a sunset now?

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If a pair of trainers is awesome, what is a sunset?

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that word has been lost to them fortunately not

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so much in this country

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but let's keep it for those special moments it's a another very interesting exercise

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if you want to take

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it on to have a day of saying exactly what you mean no hyperbole no exaggeration certainly no embroidery

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I mean have any of you ever claimed you've read a book

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you haven't read oh yeah Solzhenitsyn yeah he's very interesting isn't he yes I think we've all done

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that one that little personal aggrandizement.

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It can get very seductive and it's a slippery slope.

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And finally, we have dogma.

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My way or the highway, table thumping, the confusion of opinions with facts.

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I have a suggestion on opinions, which is that they should be offered by request only, by invitation only.

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Would you like my opinion on that?

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No. Oh, it's a little bit depressing, isn't it?

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Because we do love to offer our opinion at every opportunity.

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I grew up in a house where opinions and facts were confused.

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And that's not a great place to be because there's a great deal of table thumping in that situation.

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They're not the same thing.

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Opinions and facts, let's differentiate between them.

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Now let me give you a few danger words before I come on to the light side.

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These are words which again if you use them in conversation might just start to ring an alarm bell after this.

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It's a good thing if they do.

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Here's the first one.

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Now I've actually banned this word from my vocabulary altogether.

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I can't think of a single positive use of this word.

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If I use it about myself, then I'm beating myself up for not doing something that I should be doing.

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If I use it about you, you should really lose some weight.

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That's kind of setting myself up as superior and judgmental, and you won't like it very much.

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There are many alternatives to the word should.

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I will, or I feel as though I should.

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That's interesting.

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That's interesting is a very useful phrase to use here.

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So that may be one that you want to think about removing.

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Here's a seemingly innocent word that takes a lot of power away in our speaking.

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I'm not talking about the adjective, which is a great word.

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I'm talking about the specific adverbial use of only, merely.

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She's just a child, minimising.

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I'll just have one more.

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We all know that one, minimizing.

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Try these on for size.

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I'd just like to start with some housekeeping announcements.

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Rewind.

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I'd like to start with some housekeeping announcements.

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Which one's more powerful?

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In the first one, I was apologizing without saying it, wasn't I?

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Just, it's just a small thing.

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Do you mind if I just do this?

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It's in there a lot in our speaking.

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Maybe pay attention to that one.

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And finally, this one.

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You can almost always replace this with the word and.

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I like you, but are you going to listen to what went before the word but?

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I don't think so.

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But is a roadblocking conversation.

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It tends to be that we pay attention to what comes after it, because that's the juicy bad bit.

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We are committed to customer service, but we're not going to do anything, obviously.

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How about changing it?

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I like you and okay, we can go with that.

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We're committed to customer service and for you we can do this very small thing.

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So it's almost always possible to replace that.

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Try it in your emails, it makes a big difference.

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Now let's move on to the positive side, the force.

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There are four foundations, I think, to powerful speaking and those four foundations spell a word.

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The word is hail, which one definition of hail is to greet or acclaim enthusiastically,

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which is how I suggest your communication will be received if you stand in these four things.

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They stand for H, honesty.

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That is just being straight and clear in your speaking, not prevaricating, trying to avoid using corporate jargon.

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I don't know about you, I have a particular problem with the word provide these days.

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So let's try and be direct and clear in our speaking.

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The A is authenticity, being yourself.

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No need to pretend.

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Generally, it's far more powerful to be yourself and to be fully yourself when you're speaking to people,

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whether it's one -to -one or an audience of thousands.

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The I is integrity.

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Integrity means being your word.

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If people know about you that if you say it, it happens, your words are very powerful indeed.

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On the other hand, if you say you'll be there and you're never there, people develop a fairly cynical listening for your promises.

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The L, surprisingly, perhaps, is love.

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Now, I don't mean romantic love here, obviously.

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I'm talking about well -wishing, just wishing people well.

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It's sometimes necessary to temper the complete honesty that I'm suggesting.

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My goodness, you look awful this morning.

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Not necessary to actually to say that.

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So love is kindness and it tempers the whole conversation.

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Hail is a very powerful place to stand.

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And if you're standing on those four things, people can recognize where you're coming from.

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And it's much more powerful.

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Now, let's talk about something which you may not know you have.

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You have this amazing instrument in your throat.

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It's a combination of throat and breath, of course, and we don't teach people how to use it.

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So I just want to have a rummage in your vocal toolbox

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and particularly I want to play to pull out eight tools which you may want to consider in future speaking.

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Here's the first one.

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You may be surprised that that's a vocal tool, but it is very much partly the way you stand.

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It's good to keep it relatively neutral and not to have fidgets on stage

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and so forth if you're talking to a group.

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And also your posture can indicate a lot about how engaged you are in the conversation.

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It's also very important where your neck is.

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As you can hear, if I do this with my neck, my voice gets affected.

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On the other hand, if I do this with my neck, my voice gets affected too.

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If you want to speak powerfully, you need to give your vocal cords no strain, no stress, and the ability to work really well.

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Second, we've got breath.

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Well, it's the fuel for the voice, of course.

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The voice is only breath.

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Incidentally, if any of you ever have nerves when you're presenting to more than one person,

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or even when you're talking to one person, will you marry me?

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You know, we all get a bit nervous at that point.

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Breathing is the best way to defer those nerves and stop the voice going like this.

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You know, this is what happens to us when we're nervous because we're breathing like a bird here.

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A deep voice, a deep breath, and your voice suddenly becomes much more stable.

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You can through the mouth, out through the nose.

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We do very little breathing actually as we move around.

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It's surprising we can talk well at all.

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Let's talk about register.

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There are four registers.

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The whistle register is the highest.

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That's Mariah Carey who can do the whistle register.

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I don't suggest this is very worth practicing.

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It's not tremendously useful in your daily life.

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One down from the whistle register, we have falsetto.

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You may know falsetto.

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This is falsetto when you change gear.

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Again, not wildly useful in business conversations, I would suggest, or in presentations, although it is used a lot in music.

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So Chris Martin from Coldplay uses falsetto a great deal, and many bands do.

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It's a very attractive sound when singing.

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Not so much when you're trying to talk powerfully to people, however.

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Okay, let's move down to another one, the modal register.

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This is where we do most of our talking from

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and it covers everything from the nose up here

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if I speak in my nose can you hear the difference right down through the throat

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if I talk in my throat you can hear

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that down to talking from the chest

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which is a much bigger resonator we vote for politicians with deeper voices did you know

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that research is showing catteris paribus of course we tend to associate depth with size

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and size with importance so if you want to speak in power it's really worth

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practicing getting down into your chest register

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now this may be culture a lot of culture speak from up here in the head

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but you can do it with practice

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you don't want to speak like this it can be a bit weird just practice

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if you want to really work on this go to a voice coach

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and they'll get you down into your chest register

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there is one lower register than the chest it's called vocal fry

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and i used to say not used very much sounds like this I don't know what happened to him,

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but it sounds, yeah, that kind of thing.

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Sadly, it is used a great deal now.

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Yeah, we're really stoked about this idea.

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It's really cool.

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Ah, this is awesome.

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Largely by Americans, I have to say, but it's coming more and more into this country.

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And if you tend to speak like this, do try to engage your vocal cords.

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First of all, it's not very good for your voice.

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And secondly, it's not an engaging way to speak.

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You lose so much of the power and the richness of your voice by speaking that way.

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Talking about richness, let's talk for a moment about timbre.

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Timbre is the texture of a voice.

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We tend to prefer voices which are we describe in the same way we describe hot chocolate, rich, warm, smooth, dark and so forth.

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Let me talk about pace and pitch.

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You can get very excited going very very fast or slow right down to make a point.

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You can change your excitement just with pitch.

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Where did you leave my keys?

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Where did you leave my keys?

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Different emphasis altogether.

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Then we've got prosody, the sing song of voice.

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I love prosody.

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Monotonous comes from the idea of speaking in a monotone.

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Monotonous is exactly that.

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It's very boring.

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So prosody is root one for emotion.

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And finally, penultimately, we have volume, getting very loud to make a point or whispering, which can also be very powerful.

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And finally, we've got silence.

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Nothing wrong with a bit of silence.

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You don't have to fill it with ums and errs.

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Not necessary.

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You can use it as your friend.

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Most people don't use it well.

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Now, if you have seen my TED Talk on Conscious Listening, I used a metaphor, a short mnemonic for communication.

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Receive, appreciate, summarize, ask for good communication.

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Two of these steps actually involve speaking.

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Summarize the word so.

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I want to form a society for the preservation of the word so it actually means therefore

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therefore so if you've got a so person in a meeting

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so this is what we've all agreed now we can move on to

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that if you don't have a so person it can be a very long meeting indeed

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and it does mean therefore and it's getting abused particularly in text circles what's your name

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so I'm John I'm sorry I don't get the therefore bit is that only because I asked you perhaps

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So let's try and preserve it for what it's good at.

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And then you were asking, open -ended questions are good.

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Have you come across clean questions?

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What did you have for breakfast?

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That's a clean question.

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What do you have for breakfast?

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Did you have the eggs or the sausages?

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That's what we tend to do, offering little suggestions.

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Practice clean questions.

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And sometimes beware of the question why.

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It can be taken quite tough.

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Why didn't you do that?

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That can be taken as a criticism.

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Finally, I just want to give you a couple of pointers.

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First of all, the concept of a listening and then roadblocks to listening, to speaking and being received.

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You always speak into a listening.

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What do I mean by that?

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Well, this audience right here, right now has got a listening for me and I can tell what it is by looking at you.

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You can tell it always by little micro body language.

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This is a perfectly good listening we're seeing here

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they're all looking pretty enthusiastic aren't they this on the other hand perhaps would give us some warning signs

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so body language can give it away how do you spot a listening

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you just pay attention you ask yourself what listening am I speaking into it's a huge mistake to think

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that everybody listens like I do we all have individual listenings

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and every audience has an individual listening let me just cover a couple of buttons

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and triggers barbs and bombs these are obstacles to getting your message across.

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We all have buttons that get pushed, things that we don't like.

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And if you're not aware of that in somebody else, you can innocently say something which can really upset them.

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And we also can insert little barbs, can't we?

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In our loved one conversations, we can just put that little dig in there or even drop a huge bomb into a conversation,

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which is completely terminal for it.

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Here are four things which tend to get in the way of communication in that way.

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Semantics, simply misunderstanding that can be very big, cross -cultural, cross -language.

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We can really misunderstand people, can't we?

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Making assumptions about your listening or you making assumptions about what I'm saying and what I mean.

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Generalizations, taking one data point, extrapolating it off into the stratosphere, that's when we start using words like always and never.

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And those tend to wind up emotions.

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Now, emotions are wonderful things.

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I'm not saying don't have emotions.

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If they get very strong, and particularly if they're negative, then they can really interfere with the communication process.

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And we all know that when we're absolutely enraged in an argument.

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What tends to defuse emotions is listening.

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I would suggest there's an inverse relationship between listening and being upset.

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The more I listen to you, the less upset you'll become.

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The more you listen to me, the less upset I become, and so forth.

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So if we put some of these principles into practice in our sending, I can't guarantee people are going to listen perfectly

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but I would say you will have a much better chance of being received fully

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and we turn this situation much more into this where you're speaking consciously

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and perhaps you can ask people to listen consciously in perhaps a room that's better designed

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or we take ourselves off to a place that's better designed

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and then we have a world where sound actually is working for us instead of against us

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And I think that's a world that's worth striving for.

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Thank you very much indeed for your attention today.

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Sorry, this is one question.

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Quick one.

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I know we're running out of time. But so.

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Occasionally we have designers as featured speakers and one of the things

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that I've noticed about people who are designers they just see stuff in the environment that I just totally blank on, right?

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So they will come and complain to me that the spacing on these letters, the kerning is what they call it,

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isn't quite right or whatever it might be.

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And so I guess what I'm wondering about is for all this stuff,

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I love what I talk about is there's so much what I call hidden in plain sight stuff,

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if you'll write, that once you become aware of it you go, oh yeah, right, golly, of course.

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How much of this is just instinctual, like stuff that just you naturally have noticed and have built up this body of knowledge?

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And how much of it is learned?

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How much of the stuff that you've studied and kind of, you know, summarized and sort of brought together?

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I would guess about 70 -30. Which way?

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Instinctual or perceived to learned.

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And there are books out there on speaking and on listening, and they cover parts of the story.

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But to be honest, I think this actually is a conversation about consciousness.

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It's about awareness.

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You know, we are so unconscious.

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You heard it from Eddie.

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You've heard it from Conrad.

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We've got this tidal wave of stuff coming at us all the time,

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and it just sends us into a kind of zombie state where we're not really paying much attention.

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And if we pay attention to the sound around us,

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then we can be much healthier because we spend a lot of time in environments which are not great.

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You know, don't get me started on open plan offices when you're trying to concentrate, for example, or the sound in hospitals.

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How does anybody get well in there,

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for goodness sake? not to mention the sound in schools where millions of kids are leaving education having not heard

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it at all you know we obsess about sending education we never ask is it being received

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and that is a major problem with acoustics in school rooms so a lot of it is just

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just a lot of it is and i do use this advisedly

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because it is a minimizer just listening you know you start listening

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then everything else opens out it's like turning up the color on a tv set to engage your ears

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and actually it's a wonderful sense once you start to use it

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and then you can start to think about how you're sending as well.

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Julian thank you so much.

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Thank you.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “How to Speak so That People Want to Listen - Julian Treasure”. This video has 450 sentences and 4761 words to shadow. The speech runs for 27:15. The speaker talks at a natural 175 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
gossip noun	/ˈɡɑsɪp/	Someone who likes to talk about other people's private or personal business.
complain verb	/kəmˈpleɪn/	To express feelings of pain, dissatisfaction, or resentment.
emotion noun	/ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/	A person's internal state of being and involuntary physiological response to an object or a situation, based on or tied to physical state and sensory data.
vocal adjective	/ˈvoʊ̯.kəl/	Of, pertaining to, or resembling the human voice or speech.
awful adjective	/ˈɔːfʊl/	Very bad.
throat noun	/ˈθɹoʊt/	The front part of the neck.
broadcast noun	/ˈbɹɔːd(ˌ)kɑːst/	A transmission of a radio or television programme intended to be received by anyone with a receiver.
sin noun	/ˈsɪn/	A violation of divine will or religious law.
engage verb	/ɪnˈɡeɪd͡ʒ/	To engross or hold the attention of; to keep busy or occupied.
breathe verb	/bɹiːð/	To draw air into (inhale), and expel air from (exhale), the lungs in order to extract oxygen and excrete waste gases.
instrument noun	/ˈɪnstɹəmənt/	A device used to produce music.
deadly adjective	/ˈdɛdli/	Causing death; lethal.
hail noun	/heɪl/	Balls or pieces of ice falling as precipitation, often in connection with a thunderstorm.
whistle noun	/ˈwɪs(ə)l/	A device designed to be placed in the mouth and blown, or driven by steam or some other mechanism, to make a whistling sound.
recognition noun	/ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/	The act of recognizing or the condition of being recognized (matching a current observation with a memory of a prior observation of the same entity).

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
come across verb	To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
come back verb	To return to a place.
bring together verb	To cause people to do something together; to bring about togetherness.
build up verb	To erect; to construct.
come on to verb	To start to.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
move around verb	To relocate to new homes repeatedly; to not live in any one place for long.
open out verb	To expand, to widen, to unwrap, unfold or uncover, to spread out from a compact state.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

I think it's rather more like this, isn't it?
We all love to look good, don't we?
Can you guess what that is?
Why didn't you do that?
We can really misunderstand people, can't we?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if you say you'll be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've presented · we've invented · I've put
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is made · being spent · being listened
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	people who are · people who do · speaking which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 141 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, we're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: throat /ˈθɹoʊt/, breathe /bɹiːð/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, synthesis /ˈsɪnθəsɪs/, smooth /smuːð/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, suggestion /səˈd͡ʒɛst.ʃən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, assumption /əˈsʌm(p).ʃ(ə)n/
Long words — get the stress right: recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, integrity /ɪnˈtɛɡɹəti/, altogether /ɔl.tuˈɡɛð.ɚ/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, superior /sʊˈpɪɹ.i.ɚ/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like gossip, complain, emotion.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: How to Speak so That People Want to Listen - Julian Treasure - Learn English Speaking with Video

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