Joseph Canter TS#4
Saturday, May 16th
For my fourth tutoring session with Hongru, I continued to work with him on strengthening his reading skills. In this session, I had him read an article about the human brain from an ESL website. I would take turns reading out loud and also have him repeat sentences after me, doing his best to parrot the pronunciation and inflection. I made a point of demonstrating the melody of spoken English, explaining that although individual English words do not change meaning with different tone contours as they do in Mandarin, the melodic contour of any given phrase in English is nevertheless very important in conveying meaning. I showed this by reading out loud a sentence from the article beginning with the phrase "believe it or not." This expression is almost said with a rising-falling-rising melody. After pointing this out and vocalizing the contour of the phrase without words, I was able to get Hongru to read the whole sentence in a much more idiomatically correct manner. Hongru is already making good progress and is happy with the tutoring sessions so far.
For my fourth tutoring session with Hongru, I continued to work with him on strengthening his reading skills. In this session, I had him read an article about the human brain from an ESL website. I would take turns reading out loud and also have him repeat sentences after me, doing his best to parrot the pronunciation and inflection. I made a point of demonstrating the melody of spoken English, explaining that although individual English words do not change meaning with different tone contours as they do in Mandarin, the melodic contour of any given phrase in English is nevertheless very important in conveying meaning. I showed this by reading out loud a sentence from the article beginning with the phrase "believe it or not." This expression is almost said with a rising-falling-rising melody. After pointing this out and vocalizing the contour of the phrase without words, I was able to get Hongru to read the whole sentence in a much more idiomatically correct manner. Hongru is already making good progress and is happy with the tutoring sessions so far.
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