Unlike the first time when I met with Michelle, I have got some unique ideas about how to help her enhance her abilities at the second meeting. I was extremely excited to observe whether my ideas would be effective to assist her or whether she would be interested in the practice and would actively participate in our conversation.
After I checked the letters that we had practiced together the last time, I emphasized several letters she still need practice more so as to be familiar with them. She could not identify or pronounce the letters K, U, Q, Y, X, R, J, W accurately. Then, we started to learn some basic vowel sounds in English since the pronunciation is a big issue I should focus on to help Michelle. I showed her two videos on Youtube and asked her to watch them firstly, to follow the videos to pronounce twice afterwards, repeat all the sounds by herself finally. It was evident that Double Vowel Sounds were more difficult for Michelle to pronounce correctly. I plan to teach her consonants sounds after she can master these vowel sounds next time.
Video resources links :
Single vowel sounds
Double vowel sounds
In order to help Michelle improve her basic listening and speaking skills, I hope that I can teach her some daily English conversation sentences each meeting. I strongly believe that visual materials are the most important and effective tools to help her understand the situations and the contexts. Therefore, I still use Youtube videos to drill her listening and speaking skills. We learned how to greet people in a polite way and how to obtain more personal information about where people come from. I obviously felt that Michelle was very interested in these videos. I played each video three times till she could repeat the dialogues. Then, I practiced all of them with her to ensure she could use them in a right way.
These are the links of the website Real English Lesson 1 and Lesson 2:
Real English Lesson 1
Real English Lesson 2
At the end of the meeting, I suggested Michelle listen to all of the videos I had showed to her and practiced them in her studies and daily lives as often as possible. I also asked Michelle’s good friend, another student at CIES, to help her to practice at home since they lived together. After this meeting, I emailed Michelle and her friend the links of the videos. Hopefully, What I did can give a hand to Michelle, and she can adapt to the studies and lives in the U.S as soon as possible. Good luck, Michelle!
These are some great materials and strategies you are using with Michelle. I believe that she has some speech impediment issues, so keep that in mind as well. I think the focus for her should be on working on clearer communication rather than totally accurate pronunciation. Reading aloud is also a great practice.
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