Anne - TS #12

TS #12  

Date/Time:  Friday, January 29 2016, 10:00-11:00

Location:  Lyon Country Library

Topic/Skills:  Review of “TH”; Vowels – short a, short e

Teacher Presentation:  We reviewed the pronunciation of the voiced and unvoiced TH.  It was obvious that some students had practiced!  We made up sentences mixing the two sounds (“This thing that they threw over there was thick.”).  I then introduced two vowel sounds, the short a (“bat”) and the short e (“bet”).  We practiced a list of “a” words, then the “e” words, then the minimal pairs together.  Students worked on “silly sentences” in pairs (sentences that are grammatically correct but nonsensical, the purpose of which is to use the sounds) as I moved from pair to pair correcting pronunciation.  Finally, the students wrote their own silly sentences to read to the class.

Feedback provided to tutee:  The group is small enough so that I can still hear individual voices when we do “choral” repetition, so I was able to correct pronunciation without singling any one out at first.  Once I heard largely correct pronunciation, the students took turns one at a time, and I corrected them as necessary.  (They seem to appreciate this little 1:1 even though it’s in front of everyone else.)  I also provided feedback during my moving from small group to small group.  The ending activity – reading of their silly sentences – was a final opportunity to correct pronunciation.

Lessons learned:  The volunteer who is a speech therapist and who had visited my class last week (Debbie) returned this week.  She was very helpful to all students and working with one who has having particular difficulty.   She was also very helpful to me with her feedback.  She emphasized the value of repetition, even though students think they are ready to move on.  It was good to have spent 15 minutes on reviewing what we had done last week.  Several students  had made marked improvement, but there were still errors to correct with others’ pronunciation.   I'm enjoying teaching pronunciation.  My experience with pronunciation/phonetics courses in my second language has given me ideas of how to go about it, and following the model of those teachers is helpful.