Googled around a bit, not having much luck… In my brain the ideal would be to have a karaoke style program, ie – highlight scrolling text, with adjustable speed, that I can simply import a sound file, sync with a text file? I guess I can make a video via something like Premiere Pro, but, boy, what a tedious process… Would LOVE to hear what your best practices are, or, if indeed, there is a program dedicated to speech shadowing exercises. Thanks!
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Reading at a consistent speed is highly unnatural and would build an insane number of bad speaking habits. No program could account for each individuals cadence, and you would have to pre-program pauses and natural word groups into it for every text. I don’t think this is possible and if such a thing existed I would never use it because it would not help with natural speech. (I wouldn’t use it anyway, because I loathe shadowing as a technique and there are far better ways to accomplish the same goals).
What features would you want other than the ability to adjust speed? You could already do that with YouTube, of course. You can auto-pause videos using Language Reactor plugin for Chrome. If you use YouTube as a source, you should stipulate that students not shadow videos that are auto-transcribed. There’s many ways to do shadowing, so I think it’s a matter of telling your students how you want them to do it.
Why don’t you just make private access YouTube videos?
YouTube videos allow for captioning and also allow you to change the speed of the playback of the material. I don’t use it for shadowing, but it seems like it would work well enough.
The new horizon JHS digital textbook does text shadowing and can be sped up /slowed down with the audio on or off. It is only for the textbook content though, you can’t add your own text.