Alexandra TP 2

TUTORING PARTNER 2 – Dongsoek, Meeting 2
Today Dongsoek and I worked on his pronunciation. At first I was nervous in approaching the assignment, but I quickly found my pace. I still find that this is one of my areas of strength. In order to crystallize Dongsoek’s ability to differentiate between certain vowel sounds, as well as to strengthen his consonants, we used a packet of tongue-twisters which his CIES courses had already provided him. I asked him which consonants and which vowels, in his perception, were those that were giving him the most difficulty.

He said that r’s and l’s were the most difficult for him, and I could also hear, perhaps more distinctly, that his greatest weakness is on the consonant w. We picked out tongue-twisters which emphasized these sounds and went through them deliberately and slowly, many times. Dongsoek worked very hard and proved to have a good ear. Though he was very tired by the end of the session, Dongsoek seemed happy with his newfound grasp on certain kinds of sounds, but of course we will have to continue reinforcing this until his muscle-memory takes over. The most important thing we will need to work on is his attacks at the beginnings of words given that this determines the probability of hitting the following consonants in the word.