Stephen Tutoring 1

On Wednesday I met with John at Strozier library to have our first tutoring session. I planned to teach him English pronunciation by using the website: http://www.soundsofenglish.org/index.html . I thought it would be a good starting point for our first session because I had heard him make some obvious pronunciation errors the past few weeks. To my surprise John had very little issues with mimicking what I said. I remember that before he had tried to talk with me about the Greek god Zeus, but I couldn't understand him because he had pronounced it as "Jeus". I tested him by asking him to say the word "zip". To my surprise he said it perfectly. Then he told me that he knew that he had trouble with his "L's" and "R's". I then asked him to pronounce several words with L's and R's like lake and rake. He said them with no problem so at this point I was beginning to think that this session had been a failure. I think John has no problem producing the sounds of English, but when he is reading or has to speak quickly he has trouble telling the difference between his L's and R's and he confuses sounds like Z with J. I need to do some research on Korean in order to understand why he is having problems with these sounds, and then I will be able to teach him better. My next tutoring session will be to figure out what he needs to study in order to succeed on the IBTOEFL. Stay tuned!