Saturday, July 20, 2013

Hayley TP #4



Abdul
I met with Abdul for our third tutoring session. He found a website that has hundreds of English phrases with definitions and examples. He would look at the phrase and then try to guess the meaning. This usually was not very helpful to get the meaning correct but it was good to keep him actively thinking rather than just reading along the webpage. Next I would explain to him the meaning and he would come up with a few examples. I would help him so he had two or three good examples written down and then we would go to the next one.

These phrases would be really confusing to learn if you were not a native speaker. Most of them were verb phrases paired with prepositions which basically changes the whole meaning, for example, to pick versus to pick up. Another was to give back versus to give away. He had the most problems with knowing where to put the noun or pronoun in the phrases. Next week we plan to keep going through this website.

We also worked on pronunciation a little. He was having trouble differentiating between fall, fell, and fill. He knew the difference in their definitions but he said they all sounded the same to him. He also said them all the same way. Fall was easy enough to clarify but even after lots of repetition fill and fell sounded the same to him. He couldn’t make the i sound in fill and they both sounded like fell. After some practice he could say it right some of the time but he couldn’t hear it when he did. I am going to come up with some other minimal pairs for that sound and work on that in our next session.

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