Tutoring Session #7 (February, 7th 2015)
14:00-15:00
This afternoon’s session with Hector was a little different than
usual. Rather than focus on any particular integrated grammar skill, he asked
that we could spend time on pronunciation. For this purpose I prepared quite a
few minimal pair exercises, as well as a list of resources for him to use for
his own reference purposes (many were links that included audio material for
practicing pronunciation).
One of the areas that I did not expect to spend as much time on as
we did was ending “ed” pronunciations. I think part of the issue is the visual
aspect of the letter “e” on the page, as Hector comes from a Spanish speaking
background. I took some of the terms we were working though in reading and
rewrote them with an apostrophe in place of the “e,” followed by the “d.” This
practice seemed to help the most, but it was sometimes difficult for him to
retain that concept of pronunciation once we went back to the original
spellings of the words.
It was much easier to construct these words in pure speaking
practice by practicing the simple past tense. We created the character “Maria”
and shortly talked about what she “did” yesterday. After, we went back to
reading, and his pronunciation drastically improved.
No comments:
Post a Comment