LING260
Saki Suyama
August 21, 2014
Pronunciation Tutoring
Introduction
This pronunciation tutoring assignment was given to us to practice how to plan a lesson and to
actually teach a 30-minute lesson with an EIL student according to what the student needs to improve in
pronunciation. We conducted two tutoring sessions with the same students that we interviewed for the
pronunciation doctor assignment. We were also assigned to keep the journal to remember how the
tutoring went and what we learned from it.
Tutee’s Background
Tomo is a freshman student from China and taking his last EIL course, EIL320 advanced 2 level.
He started learning English when he was in fifth grade in elementary school since English class becomes
a requirement from this grade in China. He spends time on studying English about two hours every day
since he has a lot of assignments from the EIL class he is taking now. He would like to be able to speak
English fluently so that he can travel many countries. He is also hoping that English will help him success
in his future career as a bilingual psychologist.
Tutoring #1
On August 7, I conducted a first tutoring session with Tomo. He was very motivated and told me
that he was very excited for this because he always wanted to improve his pronunciation. Before we
started, I explained the main consonant sound we would be working on; th sound. He himself knew that
th sound was one of the most difficult sounds for him to produce and told me that his roommate always
corrects him whenever he pronounces it wrong. He had a very positive attitude even with this situation
and hoped to improve th sound so that his roommate can understand him.
The first thing I did with him was to explain how to produce th sound. To produce th sound, you
place your tongue between your teeth. If you are going to produce /ð/, you need to vibrate, and if you
are going to produce /θ/, you do not need a vibration. When I explained this to him, he already knew
them but it was just awkward for him to move his tongue in this way. With the worksheet I prepared, I
pronounced one word at a time, and he repeated after me. We went through 21 words for /θ/ and 18
words for /ð/ sound such as thin, thief, third, nothing, the, they, together, and more. Then, we
practiced distinguishing /s/ and /θ/ and /z/ and /ð/ sounds because he often replaces them with these
sounds. This is the most important point I wanted to teach in this tutoring session because I realized
these sounds were difficult to both distinguish and produce for him according to the pronunciation
doctor interview. I taught the differences between these sounds using some pair of vocabulary like
think and sink, thing and sing, breathe and breeze, and clothing and closing. I could see his
pronunciation was much better when we compare similar words like this way.
After this practice, we did a little quiz with him. I gave him ten questions of word sets with
similar sounds.
1. den
then
2. mat
math
3. they
day
4. sing
think
5. three
tree
6. mouth
mouse
7. boat
both
8. tank
thank
9. though
dough
10. sin
thin
He circled one correct answer in each question after he heard me saying them. He got 8 out of 10 after
all. The two questions he missed were they and day and mouth and mouse. Then, we switched the
role; he pronounced them for me, and I guessed which word he was pronouncing. I guessed all right
because his th sound was definitely improved and reached the point where I thought it was intelligible.
Since we had more time, I decided to pick one sentence that was on the same worksheet, and
have him practice. The sentence was “my birthday is on Thursday April third.” Although his
pronunciation got much better, he was paying too much focus on th sounds that he forgot which
syllables to stress. He sounded like “my birTHday is on THursday april THird.” I told him to keep the
stress in a right syllable and not to stress th sound. I said the sentence first and he repeated after me,
and we did this again and again slowly to faster. When I said that we were done for this first tutoring
session, he asked me to give him another last example to practice. I was very amazed by his positive
attitude and glad to hear that he wanted to practice more. I decided to pick one more sentence on the
same page which was “I thank my three brothers.” This was a tricky sentence with /ð/ and /θ/ sounds.
He struggled at first but as he said it over and over again, he gradually got better at both /ð/ and /θ/
sounds.
By the end of the tutoring session, he was able to produce th sounds, however, I wished we had
more time because I felt he needs more practice to master that sound. I felt he needed to practice
more sentences with th sounds rather than practicing individual words with th sounds because that is
what he feels nervous about. He had almost no problem with pronouncing them when it is a single
word, but he struggles when th sounds appear multiple times in a sentence. I should have spent more
time on the last activity than the first two activities to help him improve this day.
Tutoring #2
The second tutoring session took place on 14 August. Since we worked on consonant sound th
last time, I decided to work on his vowel sound this time: long vowels. One of his pronunciation issues
that I found was that he does not distinguish short vowels and long vowels well, and they all sound same
sometimes. /i/ and /ɪ/ sound are almost same in his speech that the words like ship and sheep can be
ambiguous. This is because his first language Chinese does not distinguish short and long vowels, and he
is also not aware of the differences. I prepared some worksheet with many words with long vowels to
practice his pronunciation this day. I found this on the Internet, and decided to use only the first page of
them.
On this day, he told me that he has been working on his th sounds which we practiced a week
ago. Even though it is not natural yet, he became a little bit more confident with his pronunciation than
before. I was very glad to hear and was able to see he was ready to improve other parts of his
pronunciation,
The first activity I did with him was to talk about “magic e.” When “e” appears at the end of
words, usually, the stressed vowels will be a long vowel and the ending “e” becomes silent. For
example, mad has a /ae/ vowel, which is short, however, when “magic e” appears, it becomes made,
which has no longer /ae/ sound but /ei/ which is a long vowel. We looked through about five words of
these examples including these following words.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
mad /æ/ and made /eɪ/
hop /ɔ/ and hope /əʊ/
hug /ʌ/ and huge /ju/
pet /e/ and Pete /i/
win /ɪ/ and wine /aɪ/
When I asked him if he knew magic e, he only knew that ending “e” becomes silent but did not know
long vowels appear. We compare them and I explained how short or long the vowels can be. Although
he said long vowels are challenging for him, when he pronounced them slowly, he was able to produce
them very well.
The next activity was to go over 20 words with long vowels focusing on where the long vowels
appear and how it is pronounced. Some of the words that were on the list are rude, brave, theme,
drove, hide, crime, bone, and so on. I let him pronounce them first to see if he knew the words and its
pronunciations. Although he was not familiar with all the words, he knew almost all of them and could
pronounce them very well.
The last activity was to read a story about culture shock in the EIL310 textbook. The purpose of
this activity was for him to be able to read and pronounce long vowels in a normal speech speed since
he told me that when he speaks with normal conversational speed, he always forgets to pay much
attention on pronunciation. I asked him to read a paragraph by paragraph, and after each paragraph, I
pointed out some of the words that I thought he needs some practice.
“….you somehow feel more alive: seeing new sights, eating new food, hearing the foreign sounds of a
new language, and feeling a different climate against your skin stimulate your senses as never before.”
In this first paragraph, I pointed out words like seeing, eating new food, climate, and before. He was
pronouncing them as /sɪŋ/, /ɪtɪŋ nʊ fʊd/, /klamet/, and /bɪfɔ/. I realized he was trying to read very fast
and did not pronounce each word clearly. I am not sure whether it is because he was being careless or
trying to sound like a native speaker. It made me hard to catch words to pick and teach.
Although his long vowels became better by the end of the tutoring, he seemed not realize that
his ambiguity of short and long vowels is an as important issue as his th sounds. I understand any
vowels are difficult to learn because the differences are hard to hear for non-native speakers of English.
Although he became aware of long vowels during this tutoring session, practicing of vowel sounds still
needs to be done by himself to improve more. I should have asked him to slow down when he was
reading the passage while the last activity so that I could catch exactly how he was pronouncing words
and fix how they are supposed to be. I should have told him to read slowly before he began to read.
Reflection on tutoring experience
This tutoring assignment was different from what we have done so far in LING260 class and
other TESOL classes. Since pronunciation is one of the hardest topics to teach, this assignment was a
little bit challenging for me but worth doing. I learned deciding which sounds to teach was hard
especially because we only had two times to meet our tutees and we had to condense everything in an
hour total. Another thing I learned was that even with the lesson plan, it can go wrong. When I had him
read a story of culture shock to see if he can pronounce long vowels, he was just reading through as fast
as he could instead of reading to practice his long vowels. I also did not know how to fix this situation
immediately and did not tell him to slow down. I also learned that teachers need to be good at
explaining how to produce sounds in a mouth. Even though many native speakers of English know how
to produce the sounds in their mouths, they usually do not know how to explain. When I explained th
sound and some long vowels to him, I had to explain how my tongue moves in a one place to another.
Teachers sometimes need to know some characteristics of their students’ native language so that they
can explain English sounds better. I also learned that experience is important in planning, teaching, and
explaining because through this tutoring assignment, they have taught me how I should have done and I
can do better next time. This assignment gave me the experience of how to plan and teach which was
very valuable for me in order to be a good English teacher especially in pronunciation. Future LIG260
students should definitely do the same assignment as well because they benefit from real teaching to
real EIL students and EIL students also benefit from having a rare opportunity of individual
pronunciation practice.