Richard -- Tutoring #8

On this lesson, I worked with Kyung on his pronunciation.

First of all, English is no rhythmic language like Italian and Spanish (and even Korean!!) -- English is actually a stress-timed language. I worked with Kyung on this aspect of pronunciation.

The lesson began with my describing certain stressed and unstressed words. I found a lesson plan like mine that described these words as CONTENT and FUNCTION words. Content words are nouns, principle verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Function words are prepositions, articles, and, at times, auxiliary verbs.

I read a sentence to him (once slowly with every word stressed) and the other (naturally) and I asked him what sounded most natural for a typical English speaker. Kyung chose the "natural" way; he's so smart!!!

I asked him why the "natural" way was thus, and he told me it was because I said it faster! Haha!!! His answer was so funny to me.

So I told him the reason why it was faster was because I did not stress every single word. Kyung seemed to get it. I gave him a handout in which it instructed to identify a word as either a Content or Function word. He got them all right! :)

So I had a paragraph for him after this, and I asked him to read it to me without trying to stress every single word. I let him know he could take as much time as he wanted, telling him to say the sentence in his head without telling me just yet. He spent about 2 to 3 minutes on each sentence within in the paragraph.

Then he would say it. Kyung did fairly well. He didn't stress the articles and conjunctions, but he still stressed certain words that didn't need it, such as have, am, and such.

But for the part, his English was getting more and more fluid as the lesson went on. I told him to keep practicing, to read things aloud. We ended our lesson there.