TS #11 Madison Elford

9:00am - 10:00am

Paper Fox Coffee Cafe

Today, we worked on word emphasization, and pronunciation. Since meeting Hengwei, I have noticed that when he talks, he does not emphasize words or take pauses in logical areas. It was something I hadn't even thought of as part of English learning until this point. I realized that in Chinese, emphasis can't be shown through tone because different tones change the meaning of the words. So today, we used one of his old discussion posts to work on showing him where emphasis should be in each sentence. I started by having him read the sentence aloud, then guess where the emphasis would go. I would then read the sentence (giving a little more emphasis that I would have naturally to give hints to where it would be), and then have him underline where it would be if spoken aloud. Then I had him practice the sentence again with emphasis. I also showed him where pauses in sentences go, and how long they should be. I wasn't sure how to describe it, but I used the basic rule that a pause after a comma should be shorter than a pause after a period. We also briefly talked about tones of English sentences, and how to lower the tone at the end of the sentence to signal its end. 

We then talked a few minutes on the pronunciation of "setting" and "better". The unaspirated T in the "set-" part is difficult for him to pronounce. I gave him a few youtube videos and such to help him practice it more because it was hard for me to explain. Hopefully, this will make his pronunciation even better than it was before.