AbstractThe current rise in interactions among English speakers with different accents entails occasional difficulties in understanding unfamiliar English accents. This study attempted to propose a teaching technique using shadowing to listen to unfamiliar English accents. The participants were 96 Japanese university students. One group worked on shadowing assisted by script, one on shadowing only, while the control group only listened and did not engage in shadowing. Five speech samples, each read in a different English accent, were used. A 75‐item dictation test (with 25 items each for Chinese, Italian, and American accents) was administered as both a pre‐ and post‐test. The results showed that while only shadowing practice alone may not promote perceptual adaptation, when accompanied by a script, it enhances students’ perceptual adaptation.