Ben - TP #9

Fumie and I had our last tutoring session yesterday. I was very sad about it, both because I enjoyed spending time with Fumie and because she has already shown fantastic progress in her speaking and communicating skills. This was especially apparent today, and it made saying goodbye all the more difficult. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I intended to focus our entire session on tackling the difficult pronunciation of "r" and "l" sounds. We began the session looking back over a speaking sample that Fumie had done for me in which there were a few particularly difficult words for her to pronounce. This was nice because Fumie really did the work to pick out specific words that she was having trouble with. As is the case in all of our sessions, Fumie showed great initiative to improve in any way that she can. I utilized an minimal pairs exercise that I had used a couple of sessions ago that had shown some progress. We did repetition exercises with it, reading exercises, and rapid-fire speaking exercises. I came to the conclusion that Fumie did fine with pronouncing the "l" sound on her own, and she could pronounce the "r" sound at the beginning of words with little trouble. The areas where Fumie had the most difficulty were in pronouncing "r" in the middle of and at the end of a word, and then differentiating between the "l" and "r" sounds when I spoke the word. So, it was a matter of both speaking and listening skills.
Most of the research I had done on how to teach these sounds involved minimal pairs and constant repetition. However, for me these only worked to a certain point. So, I did some more physical mouth work in forming the sounds with Fumie. I focused on the shape of the mouth when we pronounce the sounds, and how we use our breath to make the sound as well. This was when Fumie and I made perhaps our biggest breakthrough. After doing a good deal of these mouth exercises with a copious amount of repetition, Fumie finally got the hard "r" pronunciation! It was a matter of emphasizing the specific shape of her mouth and exaggerating to "rrrrr" in "r." It really was very exciting, and it seemed a fitting way to end our time together. I was sad to say goodbye to Fumie, we got along extremely well and I was so encouraged each and every time we met by her progress. At the end of our session she taught me how to say "goodbye," and "you are awesome," in Japanese. As we said goodbye to one another, I used both.