Tyler Lee TS#3 Adult

April 4

To start this session, In-hwa and I spoke about how her debate went; even though she received a B grade for the test, she was not happy with her performance and said that she froze up and forgot what her argument points were. I explained to In-hwa that it is going to be difficult, but the only way to get past this problem is going to be to learn how to think in English instead of translating Korean thoughts into English words. To start building fluency I had In-hwa speed write for 10 minutes about a simple topic-- describe your hometown and what you like to do there. I told her to just write as much as possible in the time limit and don't worry too much about making grammar errors, though I could tell that after years of programming it was a difficult task for her. After reading the writing sample, we spoke about the same topic with the same idea, try to keep it simple and think in English when speaking. I have noticed that the thing In-hwa needs the most is practice with generating speech and building fluency. After this exercise, we worked more on listening and pronunciation using minimal pairs. We reviewed <l> and <r> and then worked on weak vowel sounds <e> and <i>. Showing In-hwa a diagram that depicts tongue position when producing <l> and <r> sounds has helped, but as we know, it will always be a challenge for a native speaker of Korean to produce these sounds like a native speaker of English; she is definitely showing some progress though.