Isabel TS #16

Tutoring Je-ah - Session 9

Date/Time: Friday, August 15, 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM EST (9:00 PM - 10:00 PM KST) 
Location: Google Meet  
Topic/Skill: Minimal Pairs/Speaking

Today, Je-ah and I went over minimal pairs. I told her about minimal pairs briefly in a previous session. She thought it was challenging but fun back then, and I heard some sounds that she could use help on from our other lessons. I decided to go in-depth more and focus on her pronunciation more since she clearly has a good receptive and productive vocabulary for her level but seemed to be tripped up by some sounds. 

We started with a little warm up to get her thinking about English words: writing down a word for each consonant. Then, we moved on to talking about minimal pairs and why they are important to practice. I also informed her about the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants and made sure she could feel the difference when she spoke. 

For practice, I had a couple slides with minimal pairs and 15 pairs of words for each. We started with a couple pairs that were deemed to be important for Eastern language learners. I read most pairs aloud and had her repeat them back to me until we both could hear the distinctions when she spoke. 

Then, after two of my six slides, I was asking her how she felt about these practices and if there was anything difficult that she wanted to go over. She had some other sounds in mind, so we practiced those instead of what I had prepared. We really focused on <f> and <v> sounds with word pairs and then full sentence examples until she felt more confident making the distinction. 

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