Building Pronunciation Skills

While I have been able to teach my student many grammatical principles and vocab items this semester, the most fulfilling part (besides growing a relationship) has been to help her strengthen her pronunciation skills. She let me know at the beginning of our time together that she wanted to sound like native speaker so I have kept that in mind as I teach my lessons, adding pronunciation practices in where I see issues. We have learned how to pronounce the past tense /-ed/. It gives me such joy to see her stop in the middle of a reading and remember to feel for vibrations in her throat to know whether to end her word with [t], [d] or [ed]. I can see her improving and having to use that technique less and less.

This Monday there was a particularly high amount of st-, sp-, sc- words in our reading. As a native Spanish speaker she is always tempted to add a schwa to the beginning of these words: eschool, she says, or estop. While babysitting a sweet 4-year old with a speech impediment over the summer, I saw her mother stop her while she was having troubles with her S's, have her drag her finger along her forearm as she pronounced the S in snack and then finish the word when she reached her palm. Ssssssssssss nack. Every time she was made to focus on the S she could easily say the word afterward and had less trouble with similar S words for at least a few minutes. I tried this with my student. "You may feel silly trying this but as a Spanish speaker you are not used to starting a word with S and another consonant. This will help you think about the S!" She loved it! She tried one word (Ssssssssss top), sat back and said "Wow! I can do it!"

Have you guys had any interesting pronunciation teachable moments this semester?