NALC Meeting 6

On Tuesday November 1st at 11 a.m. through 12 I was able to work with an International student from Asia. He told me about his opportunities working at a new job in a pizza place here in the United States. He was eager to get started on his fifth session so we dove right in. I felt that right off the bat he had an understanding of what he was reading, the only thing was a few missed words here and there. We walked through individual words and stay on about two pages of material for the first 20 minutes or so reading. He was able to then switch to writing and spelling. His quick understanding of fill-in-the-blank terms caused us to talk about the meanings of the word which provided some humor throughout the session on both parts. The fun part was pronunciation because that was the main focus the student wanted to work on. After running through all of the words on Lessons 2-Lessons 5, we walked through numbers 1-100 as we did in my previous session. We had to work first on syllables and second on basic mouth and tongue movements for word pronunciation. His main struggle was with endings of "ist" or "st" because he would add a "ta" at the end of it. Even when we slowed it down. This part was very fun for a teacher because I was able to quickly find ways to sound out words uniquely by saying to the student "first sat "eh" "sst" and then I would follow behind it and wave my arms and say to the student (stop, abrupt, it just ends right there). This experience was hilarious but overall both me and the student were laughing after 15 minutes of it because he could finally pronounce the terms correctly after we broke everything down more and more. With "is" the student and I looked through the differences in soft vowels and long vowels. As we went back to the text for the last 20 minutes, we were able to read through sentences and work on rhythm as well as overall word pronunciation knowledge. Using a notepad, as was used in all my previous sessions, gave me a quick reference where I could write out and explain words and sounds to students. Since this student was international, this especially worked. He also pulled out his iPhone and searched through his own language's interpretation of two early words, polite and something else I cannot remember. He did understand and enjoy my interaction. I liked how we really worked on his fundamentals and stuck to the lesson plan. Overall, It was a great session.