Ted Hong - TP8

For my tutoring session yesterday, May 29, I fashioned a lesson plan for Butsawan and Rose for them to have better preparation and practice for speaking.

I know Rose is deeply concerned about her accent, and I had told her before as I told her again that the first thing she should focus on is her communicating ideas and being understood. It's the last thing. To reassure her, I told her that there are many English accents and even a good amount of people still struggle with the minute details to accents. However, I told her it was possible to learn other accents/overcome her accent. I then showed this video:
Amy Walker - 21 Accents
...uh twice. The second time with the closed captioning because in her accent, the captions follow respectively per region.

Following that, I told them that we would be focusing on preparation for speaking, which relied on the use of listening, as well. I told them that the exercises I had them do before were not just for the heck of it and they were legitimate exercises. I took the exercises I had learned back in high school and figured it'd be appropriate to apply them here. One of which was The "GKDTBP Exercise", as I called it. It is also performed in the videos. To support my claim, I showed them the first and fourth video and had them participate in the exercises. This is a link to the 4th video:
National Theatre - Exercise 4: Articulation

I told them that being silly is all a part of it, serving as an ice-breaker and taking away the fear of being criticized. Rose was still concerned about the way her English is spoken, and I told her of one exercise which was to continuously say words all in one breath to help her get into the practice of things. We're going to practice that next session.

Following this, I showed a scene from FRIENDS (I... did a lot of visual learning. So much that two other students, Michelle and Mariam, who were just hanging out commented on my style of teaching. They were positive which relieved my concern) where Ross comes in mortified over his divorce and Rachel joining the group after running out of a wedding.

I presume everyone knows these characters as they were definitely a huge part in American television, specifically sitcoms. I chose a sitcom for their focus on dialogue. It's dialogue heavy but it's not heavy in the sense that it's hard to understand. Not to mention it offers a great source of American culture, even if it is sort of a caricature of people's lives. The laugh track would also help provide cues as to when jokes were made, despite the fact that they may overdo it.

I showed them the scene, then I pulled up the script of that episode from here: FRIENDS Script - Season 1, Episode 1

I had Rose and Bustawan read lines, and I even included the other two whom were apparently involved in my lessons. I thought I'd try a deductive approach first to give them an example of how the lines were said. This would allow them to infer the inflection and tone of the dialogue. I reminded them of the use of thought groups that I had covered in previous sessions.

After those lines were read through, we talked about certain things. For example, the part where Ross says, "I just want to be married again," is then followed by Rachel running in dressed in a wedding gown. Chandler then chimes in saying, "And I just want a million dollars!" I had to explain why that situational irony was funny.

Which, then lead to sarcasm. I explained verbal sarcasm is best exhibited in the intonation/stress in a sentence. Butsawan knew what it meant and even supplied an example. "Oh yeah. I'm great." I read it several different ways to give an extensive understanding.

I then had them read lines further into the scenes and showed the rest of the segment to them. That appeared to be an epiphanic moment. The angels descended with a chorus of awe... heaven's light shone through the windows as the comparison made between their readings and the way it was performed had... come to light. This inductive approach appeared to be more fruitful, but I don't think it would have been as effective had I not done the deductive approach first. They were repeating lines a couple times after listening to them.

Class time was up and I was surprised by all the positive feedback I received. I got compliments from other students and Olga, one of the teachers. She came in to prepare for her class and noticed my notes on the board. I gave her the gist of my lesson and even got a thumbs up from her. Not literally, but in conversation. I imagined a giant hand above her head that gave me a thumbs up, though. This definitely made up for last week's morale burn out.