Reflection of Lesson 1---Front Vowels

After the last week’s tutorials sessions, I found the following points:
1. Chinese Ss get used to speaking any language with their local accent. This is
obviously seen among Chinese Ss, the intonation is close to Henan dialect, which
is the result of lacking of mandarin language speaking. So I suggest my Ss should
speak mandarin in public and daily life instead of Henan Dialect.
2. Ss couldn’t pronounce the single phoneme in a word clearly, they like to add
an /ə/ at the end of each word: ‘good’ is pronounced as /’gudə/, ‘like’ is
pronounced as /’laikə/, this phenomenon is commonly found in long sentences, ‘I
don’t like ….’etc.
Maybe it’s a result of long-term using dialect.
3. Ss are ruled strictly by the pronunciation rules. There’s an example. I told Ss to
make /i:/ longer when I taught /i:/ & /i/, but some of them made it too long, just
like they made /i/ too short.
Actually, long and short are relative to each other. Because of phonological
process affecting vowel length, short vowels in one context can be long than long
vowels in another context. So I may suggest we should make each phoneme more
lively, naturally.
4. I gave two lessons last week, the first lesson was not that good, time-
controlling, contents of lesson are not really satisfying, but when it came to
Thursday, Things got better and better, I controlled the time more accurately,
and the contents were really helpful.
5. Lacking of multi-media equipment help is really obvious. I’ve got lots of
resources to share, but because of the conditions and some reasons, I cannot
play it for Ss, so Ss cannot intimate the British accent as I expected.
6. In the following weeks. I’ll learn to do something to add more interactions with
my Ss, and prepare more useful information for Ss (not just on pronunciation,
but also about language learning, public speaking, English writing, critical thinking
etc.)
I do think pair work is an effective way to learn pronunciation, once I gave Ss the
words patterns sheet, they talked together, usually they could get the accurate
pronunciation of the sheet. That’s the power of team work, I’ll keep it.
There’s one more thing I need to say. Pronunciation is not just a kind of speaking, it
is a combination of speaking and listening. So we also need to pay attention to
other’s pronunciation.