I met with In-hwa-kim yesterday to practice speaking. We focused on phonics and incorporated things I have learned from my experience in linguistics. I found it to be significantly easier to tutor an adult than tutoring a child. In-hwa-kim knew the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) so explaining sounds in English was made simple! When we first met, we introduced ourselves and gave a little background about ourselves. As we did this, I paid attention to her level of understanding and what difficulties she had while speaking. She had trouble pronouncing the phonemes: L, Z, R, TH, and P.
After introducing ourselves, we focused on a paper she had written in CIES. The exercise I had her do was to read the paper out loud and stop after each paragraph. During the pauses between paragraphs, I underlined the words she had mispronounced and went over them. This way she wold not be discouraged since I underlined after she spoke and not during. After going through the complete essay, we went over the words that needed the most phonetic help.
I took a linguistics class and learned, not only how to write IPA, but also where to place the tongue and how to shape the mouth when pronouncing specific sounds. For example, I taught In-hwa-kim that 'th' is an inter-dental fricative and that 'z' is like a voiced 's' (when the throat vibrates). With my explanations and having her repeat the sounds several times, she finally learned!
Our final exercise was to record her speech. I came up with a list of words that used the difficult sounds and had her read them until she pronounced them correctly. I also reminded her how to position her tongue in order to make the sounds and had it recorded so that she can re-listen to the recordings.
No comments:
Post a Comment