TS #6 Madison Elford

9:00am-10:00am

Paper Fox Coffee Cafe

Today, we focused on difficult pronunciations of words. A lot of the minimal pairs we went over were difficult for him to hear the difference between, and then even more difficult for him to pronounce. Pairs such as "lull and low", "four and fall", and "full and fall" were words he struggled to differentiate. We talked about the different L sounds, such as the Light L, and the Dark L in English. Another difficult spot in pronunciation was "usually" and "version". "Usually" contains the Dark L that does not exist in his host language, Chinese. The same issue occurs in "version", where the /v/ sound simply doesn't exist in the Chinese sound system. The closest letter that exists int eh Chinese sound system was /w/, and I helped explain that /v/ and /w/ were similar, but the sound changed at the end depending on the lip movement. He had trouble hearing the difference, so we reveiwed some minimal pairs such as "Vow and Wow", and "Vest and West". He said he would continue to practice these sounds. I also showed him images of where the tongue placement is for these different sounds. I think the lesson went really well today.