Ted Hong - TP5

On Thursday, May 17th, I sat down with Butsawan and Rose again.

We reviewed on some previous tongue twisters as well as some new ones. Here are several that produced trouble for them:

The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick.
Will weary rebels rarely win?
Should saucy sharks seek shelter soon?

I've learned that Butsawan appears to pick up things with minimal difficulty, however the case is retaining. She's got a lot on her plate so it's understandable. I'm trying to help with that by giving a documented form of our sessions for them to review. Although Rose has tremendous difficulty in pronunciation, I feel that once she grabs hold of the concept, it sticks in her mind. I'm very impressed.

We discussed the certain difficulties that Rose had in words, such as when she has to include a suffix pronunciation. Vietnamese speakers do not have an ending... syllable, so to speak. Almost on par with a silent letter (to my understanding) in that it is very subtle. I suppose an example would be saying the word "but". We would say it from "buh" to "-tt" as opposed to just saying "buh" as most native American English speakers do in passing.

Therefore, her troubles were made apparent when she would have to say something like "gathered to". She puts a lot of stress in the ending of a word to ensure that she says it and so she has trouble when the sounds are so close to each other ("d" and "t"). I'm looking up ways to help rectify that.

Sixteenth, sixtieth, six, bragged, challenged were so other difficult words.

I was also asked to elaborate about phrasal verbs... and I was stumped. I was asked about a rule of sorts so they could remember when it's used. I told them I'd get back to them. To the google machine! ...or wiki machine! ... or grammar books...

In case anyone is interested or are unawares, a phrasal verb is an idiomatic phrase consisting of a verb and another element, typically either an adverb such as, break down or in a preposition, see to, or a combination of both such as, look down on .

Following that, I went into discussing "thought groups", which was actually a concern brought up by them but I didn't think it was actually... a thing. This is taken from a .pdf file on our blackboard, and I suggest a gander. It's muy helpful.

A thought group is a grammatical phrase in English that contains a major idea. So in the following sentence, there are 4 thought groups: My friends and I// went/ to the mall// last weekend. When native English speakers speak, we speak in a sort of... contraction of words, which end up sounding like 1 word to those who are learning English as a second language. (However, I'm not sure I agree with there being 4 thought groups. I feel like there's 3 but what do I know?)

After a little explanation on that, Butsawan and Rose got the idea of it and began speaking in that manner. There was a "Tortoise and the Hare" excerpt or abridged version and I had them read it. When they read, it seemed like there was more of a natural flow.

At the end of our session, I figured I'd ask the two of them for an evaluation of my performance. I wanted to know if the sessions we had were effective or not and if there were anything I could possibly do to enhance our meetings. They told me that they're learning a lot and were most grateful. Then they wondered if it took me a lot of time in putting these things together. While it does require a certain deal of effort, I assured them that it wasn't that big a deal and I really wanted to help them. I can sympathize as I know my parents had to struggle with the same scenario, my parents still do.

I could also help with my parents following this program and see what I can do's. That about wraps up this post. Hope everyone is doing awesomely awesome in their tutoring sessions as well as everything else!