Alexandra-Tutoring (Dong Soek) blog 2

Alexandra-Tutoring (Dong Soek) blog 2

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been continuing to work with Dong Soek, who I must say, is fast becoming a good friend. His friendly demeanor and work ethic make him a great student to work with and he’s willing to try anything, but, to my pleasant surprise, feels comfortable enough with me to express his doubts about certain methods or approaches.

For instance, during our last session, Dong Soek, informed that a colleague had commented on how his accent was changing, apparently in an unfavorable way. I talked to him a little more about this concern and asked him if he thought it was connected to our lessons. He said that it was not entirely the case, but that he thought it had something to do with it. This surprised me, especially since we have been working together on conversation and he has made considerable strides (his pronunciation, though still distinctly Korean sounding, is much sharper and his consonants are clearer).

It was only when, I found out that this colleague was a girl from South Korea, and that this girl had known him since the beginning of his time at the CIES, that my fears and conflicts were assuaged. This is not to discount her opinion, but, by talking it out, we came to the conclusion that it was likely that what the girl was responding to negatively was simply a linear, change- in fact his progress- which now makes him sound different than when he had a much thicker and very typically Korean accent.

I assured him that by my ears at least, he now sounded much more articulate, and had what seemed like far more confidence. Just the same, I asked him if there was anything else he wanted to work on in order to quell his insecurities about speaking and accents. He said he was uncertain about intonation. This makes perfect sense. Dong Soek has been making very good progress in pronunciation, but I had neglected to work with him on sentence cadence.

My new strategy is to continue with the tongue twisters, and the reenactmentof scenes from his favorite TV shows (as we have been doing), but I am now going to try to introduce him to different kinds of speech cadences. Since there is no one answer to "how to produce an English cadence", I am trying to develop a multi-pronged approach. First, I am going to use our recreation of scenes from "Modern family", but I will have him interpret the scenes, reading them through with one consistent emotion each time, tying on several for size to see how stress changes the articulation of the lines (examples: angry, sad, overjoyed, etc.). I also sent him home with a couple of samples of presidential speech so he has a point of reference for oratory, and more rhetorical, official modes of address. I wanted him to listen to them and get the cadences in his ears.

Now, this coming week I will give him a couple of casual interviews with scientists to listen to, so he becomes acquainted with the cadences of more normal, spontaneous, yet still slightly formal speech. I plan to continue working our way down all the way through more relaxed and informa/academicl speech. I ill keep introducing him to different styles, until he can loosely distinguish stress patterns and rises and falls in voice depending on the speech context. I am eager to see how this will or will not work, but I trust that Dong Soek will be honest with me either way. My other tutee, Latifah, who at first seemed like a promising student, has continued to cancel her lessons repeatedly, usually without notice, and so I have had to seek out another tutee. I am eager to meet this new student and see what she is like.