Now, I'm wondering if Kukit found the speech I chose hard to understand. I will ask him next time I see him. I'm learning alot and I'm thankful that both Jin and Kukit are patient with me as I do so. I now know to take accents into consideration.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Francis- TP 3
I met with Jin yesterday during Tea Time for our first tutoring meeting. Since he is also interested in improving his speech I figured doing the same thing I did with kukit might start off our sessions in a relaxed and fun note. I found another speech by Martin Luther King called "I've Been to the Mountaintop" and had Jin read it out loud. Jin had about the same kind of errors as Kukit had. The letters R and L are hard for him to pronounce. I advised him to pause and take words that have these letter a bit slower so his mind could concentrate on the pronunciation of each letter. I also suggested keeping a list of words that are hard to pronounce in his notebook. Some might not be likely to pop up in conversation often but if they challenge him in maybe reading them out loud every once in a while might help his mouth exercise the pronunciation of the letters they contain. When we watched the video, Jin found MLK's accent hard to understand. I explained that there are different accents in the US andread the speech instead. There were some words which were new to Jin so we went over those and Jin added them to his notebook of new vocabulary words.
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Francis, I may try using speeches too, to help improve my tutee's listening skills. I like this tactic.
ReplyDeleteFinally, I wonder if most international students think there is a standard accent spoken here in the U.S., then feel surprised about how different we can sound regionally?
Way to infuse the lesson with a powerful piece of American history. Obama's presidential acceptance speech is awesome, I used it for my LP on expository writing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jll5baCAaQU
ReplyDeleteTED has some excellent speeches about ideas that are changing our world. King's "I Have A Dream" speech has a nice natural cadence to it that may be easy to read.
Best of luck!
I met quickly with my other Tutee Nakjoon yesterfay and we apoke about pronunciation to which he also expressed his difficulty with L and R, so we speant a few moments practicing L with the tongue touching the top of mouth and then a word like lake. R with holding the mouth open and then a word like rooster. there is a pronunciation resource book in our supplemental materials by Vicki and some things by Ramin and it is good to look over and fun to practice tthat stuff, but I am naturally silly.
ReplyDeleteI really like this idea of going over a speech and then watching it, it's something I hadn't thought of before, and a great way to include a cultural aspect! And yes, accents are definitely something to be wary of. Sometimes they can be fun, though, and you never know when your tutee is going to have to speak to someone with a heavy southern accent, living in the south and all. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone. I think both my tutees and I had fun and also learned a lot. This experience taught me to look out for more technical things that might get in the way of a lesson.
ReplyDeleteSee This I Believe for essays that have a more everyday tone and delivery.
ReplyDelete