For our tutoring sessions, Kukit had explained wanting to focus on his pronunciation and speaking. While we talk for conversation partners, I’ve built a good routine of correcting his speech when I can figure out the words he’s mispronouncing. But for our tutoring sessions, we mainly stuck to the minimal pairs I picked out for our first session. I see the same problem with Kukit as I see with June Won in our pronunciation sessions: they’ll pronounce their “r,” “l”, “v,” etc. correctly after we’ve done mouth exercises together, but after we practice the sound over and over, the muscle memory fades away, and they fall back into the same mispronunciation.
So to keep Kukit from tiring, I decided to mix up some of our activities. Kukit is farther behind in English than June Won, so I saw it to be necessary to mix up our speaking exercises. I picked role playing, not only because I could listen to pronunciation, but so Kukit could slowly crawl out of his comfort zone. I told him to try to put as much emotion and inflection into his script as possible, and make it sound as natural as he could.
We read over three short scripts. Each time I underlined words he was mispronouncing, and we would go over them after the first dry run. Then we switched roles, so he could try to mimic how I read the script. By the end of our session, I could tell that this type of speaking exercise worked much better for him. June Won only has pronunciation problems at his level, so he has no problem spending our entire session on minimal pairs and tongue twisters, but Kukit needs applied activities for now.
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