Ben - TP #7

I just finished another fantastic tutoring session with Fumie and today marked an interesting, and very constructive, change of pace for us. Instead of the usual reports that I go over at the beginning of all of our sessions, we dove right into our food topic. I had asked Fumie to draft a polished version of a speech sample that we had roughly gone over last session, and then orally deliver it to me. She did this quite well, though they were a few grammar problems of course. We briefly went over these, and we also discussed what her main idea was and how effective she was in presenting this idea. I referred a bit to the TOEFL speaking rubric provided on Blackboard, but not too much. I feel it helps Fumie more when I give her more informal constructive criticism and help because she seems to respond to this the best.
The main difference for today's session was our emphasis and work on pronunciation. As I mentioned in my last post, I believe Fumie is advanced enough in her English speaking that most of what we work on will focus on refining her speech and making it the best it can possibly be. Therefore, today's session I decided to focus on pronunciation. I learned from Fumie that traditionally Japanese people struggle with the "l" and hard "r" sounds in English, so we worked very hard on those. I used a minimal paris exercise with words like "rice" and "lice," as well as "red" and "led." This actually did not seem to help Fumie's pronunciation much so I took a page out of the old theatre work and decided to work with Fumie on the specific construction of the sounds of the letters through her mouth. For example, the tip of the tongue placed on the roof of the mouth can be used to produce the "l" sound. I am happy to say that Fumie responded very well to this method and soon had very little trouble pronouncing "l" correctly. Then we worked on "r," which was substantially more difficult. It was tough to explain what to do with your mouth to make the hard "r." We did make some progress through when I had Fumie picture a "w" before the "r" in certain words and then try to pronounce them. "Red," became "wred" and this actually worked extremely well. Before I knew it, our session had ended. We still have a lot of work to do on "r," especially at the end of words, but I will look into some effective lessons and strategies to help Fumie. Unfortunately Fumie has to go back to Hiroshima in a few days which really is too bad because she has shown amazing progress.