Charlie - TS#15

 Date/Time: Monday, June 21, 9:00 a.m.

Location: Zoom 

Topic/Skill: Reduced Pronunciations in Use / Dictocomp 

Feedback Provided to Tutee: After going over many of the types of reduced pronunciations in the lesson prior, I wanted to give DoJun the chance to use some of these examples in an actual conversation. We began today's session with a brief clip of two guys chatting where there were a couple instances of reduced pronunciations that I wanted to point how so that he could hear them in normal conversation. We then went into a dictocomp that I created. I left blanks where any reduced pronunciation could be found and told DoJun to either write down the reduction or to write out the formal version of each condensed phrase. After running through the dictocomp twice, I then gave DoJun the opportunity to repeat what he thought he heard throughout the whole script. This allowed him to see how the reductions fit in actual speech and, even when he missed certain phrases, he was able to think through the situation and find the best-fitting words. After finishing the dictocomp, we just went over difficult vocabulary and phrases which was constituted primarily of idioms. 

Lessons about the tutoring and/or the tutee that you learned: Today, DoJun asked me a question that I REALLY didn't know how to answer. As he was asking it, I knew that I was not going to have an answer to it. It was about the subjunctive past tense which I have very minimal extrinsic knowledge of. I made my best attempt to answer his question but really just ended up pushing it off to the next session. I was a bit uncomfortable in the moment but it just shows that, as an ESL teacher, we are not going to know everything and we have to be okay with that. Learning to accept this and learn from it rather than be discouraged will be important in my ESL journey. It's hard to tell after only 15 sessions, but I really do feel like DoJun has made progress under my instruction which is a really cool feeling. Hearing him use various grammatical patterns and idioms that we went over along with correct pronunciations on words that we reviewed is a testament to what we have done over the past couple of months. 

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