DJ TP#11

Monday I met up with Wayo again. She told me that she wanted to prepare for a speaking test. I started off by asking her to explain some things to me as best as she could. She was my conversation partner, so I quizzed her on somethings that we talked about during some of our first talks. First, I asked her to explain the Edward Snowden situation. She did a good job of explaining the situation back to me, and it seemed that she understood what I told her the first time. She had a few small mistakes along the lines of saying "he was going to be" instead of "he was going to". She also had a few pronunciation errors, which I went over with her at the end, instead of interrupting her. After that, which practiced pronunciation as well as composition, I decided to focus on just pronunciation. I gave her the print out that I read from for my culture class, and told her to read it as fast as possible. I wrote the piece in a typical expository style, so I figured it would be easy enough to read from. She did a good job of this as well, making her way through the essay quickly without too many mistakes. one of the main things she did was use the wrong intonation, for instance when she read a question as though it was a statement. it seems these things simply come from practice: you have to learn what patterns of words will come at the beginning of a questions versus a statement. The last thing we focused on was "r"s and "l"s. Wayo is from Korea and has trouble with these two sounds. I tried to show her how to make them play saying r and l words very slowly, trying to open my mouth wide so that she could see what I was doing. I explained to her what your tongue does when making an l sound(it goes up to your teeth) and an r sound(it kind of floats in the middle while your teeth close). This seemed to help a little bit, but I think it's one of those things that is really hard to do without practice, like an umlaut "o" or that hebrew coughing noise is hard for Americans to say.