Charlene TS #3-Adult

Met with my adult tutee today at Strozier Library. This was our third meeting. Professor Kim had been kind enough to arrange my access to Strozier Library, an issue for me since I am a student only at CIES right now, not main FSU. However, since it was a nice day, my tutee chose a nice table outside. We discussed The Red Shoes story that she listened to last session. She said, since we last met, she had spent some time on YouTube, and reviewed the story in Korean and English. I complimented her on her initiative. She remembered that this story had been turned into a science fiction movie in Korea, and told me about that story—which, as art does, made a few diversions from the original story.

We discussed the words in the story that she was unfamiliar with last time, and I gave her a vocabulary sheet with word definitions. But, she appeared to have familiarized herself with the words already.

I noticed that she had a problem with pronouncing the word shoes. She said shoz-es, making it a two-syllable word. We practiced stopping the word quickly, trying to keep her from gliding into a second syllable. (I likely would not have been prepared for this, except for my conversation in class with Wonmi last night. So, thanks, Wonmi!)

We also discussed her “La-La-ing” in the shower to improve her pronunciation of Ls. She said she was asked to change her morning song, since, evidently, she has been quite consistent with this. I decided to pull up The-Rain-in-Spain-Falls-Mainly-in-the-Plain scene from “My Fair Lady” on YouTube on my laptop, so she hear and copy this as a possible change. I noticed that when she repeated the sentence, she was doing well with pronouncing Ls in words singly (La-La-ing apparently paid off), but the double-L in the word falls sounded more like an R. She had to slow down considerably to make the sound work, but we will need to work on this a bit more.

I had come prepared to talk about minimal pairs (great timing, considering Prof. Kim’s lesson las night) and work on some more sounds today with my tutee, but her husband called. We had gone a little overtime.

We decided to meet again next Wednesday and, had discussed earlier perhaps meeting at the Tallahassee Museum next week. I promised I would send her driving directions this week. She works hard and deserves to have a little fun. The museum would be fun, as well as educational and would give us a lot to talk about—in English.