Freshman Monroe Summer Projects

First, my suspicion that native Chinese speakers use chinese sounds to remember english ones was confirmed (In retrospect, that’s fairly obvious). Chenying [our Zigen friend] even had stories to remember how to pronounce words. For instance, tomato was: ta ma tou (like the British pronounce it), which in chinese is “his mom steals.” I corrected her pronunciation of the second syllable to be: ta mei tou (American). This turns out to mean “he didn’t steal” in chinese. In this case, “he didn’t steal” actually sounds exactly like our pronunciation of “tomato,” and the mnemonic works. In other cases, though, I’ve learned that their past english teachers have taught them mnemonic devices that lead to mispronunciations. For instance, she remembers “table” as ta bao le: he is full. Clearly, bao-le is not how “ble” is pronounced. It’s two syllables.

There seems to be a pattern here. Chenying makes terminating consonants their own syllable. Instead of “sleep,” she’d say “slee-puh,” and instead of “eat,” says “ea-tuh.” This is an interesting situation because in chinese, each letter in pinyin, the chinese alphabet, represents a sound. Each sound is one syllable. So, a word that has lots of letters but only one syllable is confusing. It’s not easy to explain how to pronounce terminating stops, especially when “eat” can be pronounced as /it/ or /iʔ/.

Shi laoshi had a lot of trouble with the word “brown.” Somehow, she just couldn’t say it. She tried “bread,” and she tried “b-lown,” but it took several tries to get her to correctly say “brown.” I think this is partly the single syllable thing and a little bit of the L/R mix-up common in chinese learners of english as well.

Monday 5/25/09

They [the fifth graders] were a lot better than I expected, much better than my adult friend. The only letter they had trouble with was V. There isn’t a V in Chinese, though according to a friend, Beijing natives germanize their w’s sometimes and say “vei shen me” instead of “wei shen me” (“why”). Wonder why this is.

Tuesday 5/26/09

[6th grade] Problem alphabet letters: C (“say”), L (“el-uh”), M (“ahm”), N (“hn”), S (“es-uh”), Z (“zay”), F (“ef-uh”), U (“yoh”), Q (“kyoh”).

Specifically: they had trouble pronouncing the long U sound and the long E sound and overenunciated terminating consonants.

Overall, they seemed to have a lot of trouble with long vowels. “Right” was also pronounced with an ah instead of an aI. Vowels seemed like a major problem. Consonants were okay besides overemphasizing ending consonants (this hasn’t been difficult to correct, just difficult to get them to remember).

What’s interesting is that they are extremely interested in learning IPA. Without even suggesting it, several classes have requested to learn it. I don’t really know why since most of them haven’t learned any IPA, but I guess they’ve been exposed to it from their textbooks. I’m glad they want to learn it, and I’m going to review it with my team so we can teach it to them. I’m worried that it is a little complicated for them, but we’ll see what we can do. If it’s possible, I think it would be a great tool to leave them with, and if they are willing to put in effort, they could get so much more out of a dictionary.

Saturday 5/30/09

This morning, the others went to Xiang Shang school to give a dance performance for Children’s Day, but I stayed behind and painted a mural of a village and a city on the wall at the activity center (to represent the migrant worker’s migration). This afternoon, we taught adults English.

I spent most of my time working with the adorable Hong Yan grade English teacher (who reminds me of Miss Honey) and her boyfriend. We worked on pronunciation because that was all she needed. She knew IPA already, so we reviewed that because she wanted to (the symbols she knew were a bit different). She brought a textbook, so I had her and her boyfriend take turns saying a dialogue, and I would correct their pronunciation and note their problem areas (for instance, for words that ended in y, they cut out the “i” sound, so I gave them lots of examples of those to read and repeat).

They seemed to have trouble with “th,” but that wasn’t hard to correct, but the most trouble they had was with “ur” and “uh.” We spent about an hour on “ur.” I taught them this: start at “ri” (chinese word for “sun”) and slowly glide your tongue toward the back of your mouth until you get the sound, making sure to keep your tongue rounded. I drew lots of diagrams of the mouth, of the position of the tongue in the mouth and which parts of the tongue touch the roof of the mouth, and I had them practice making the mouth tenser and laxer. Eventually, the girl got it, and we hugged. Tears may have been shed. The guy took a little longer. Finally, they were able to pronounce “thermometer” quite well. Then, we worked on “uh,” since that was in a lot of words. That took a while too.

I tried explaining to them which word to stress in sentences, but I’m not sure that worked out quite well.

I explained to the teacher some of the mispronounciations she made in her lesson that I listened in on, and finally she was able to pronounce “pear” correctly after the “ur” lesson (though she sometimes slipped; I gave her exercises for homework), and I explained that the stress in “watermelon” is on the first syllable. She said that’s what she thought, but her tapes said differently. I said her tapes were wrong and she was right. They asked how to pronounce “think.” They said they thought it was pronounced “think,” but some say “sink.” I said they should trust their instinct. I explained the tS, dz +es rule to the teacher for future reference (I explained this a few entries up).

Monday 6/8/09

Later, I tutored a guy who said he’d learned English for 12 years, but his English was at an elementary school level. He said the highest grade he’d even gotten on an English test was a 60. He was a business major, and English was the reason he failed out of college. According to him, English is one of the most important things in the business world, and there’s no getting around it. Basically, he never studied when he was little, so he couldn’t catch up, and he just fell more and more behind. He asked me to start teaching him from the basics.

So, we went over the alphabet, which he knew pretty well, and then I tried to get him to read some easy words (house, mouse, octopus). He had a lot of trouble sounding things out. He asked to go over the phonetic alphabet, so we did that, and he had SO much trouble with the vowels, particularly [I], [ɛ], and [ae]. He was a particularly difficult student because he couldn’t even tell the difference between the vowel sounds when I repeated them over and over again.

After about two hours of going over sounds (I’m not sure he understood the purpose of IPA because he was very perplexed with the sound that [j] makes; also, an interesting note: IPA consonant sounds are very similar to pin yin), we went over short and long vowels, and then we took a break and then I asked him if he could make his own sentences.

He said no (for 12 years of instruction!), so I tried to teach him sentence structure and work pronunciation into that too. I’d say, “I like to watch movies,” and he was fine with simple sentences like that (though I had to remind him of some of some of the vocab), and then we had a lesson on adjectives and adverbs. I told him that generally, the adjective goes before the noun it modifies and the adverb goes after the verb it modifies (not always true, but worked for our purposes). We wrote many basic sentences together and then went back and inserted adjectives and adverbs, and I taught him some adjectives and adverbs he didn’t know, like “more.” So for instance: “Fat children sing a lot, but skinny children sing more.” “Fat” and “skinny” modify the nouns that succeed them and “a lot” and “more” modify the verbs that preceded them. I know this is way simplified, but it was all I could do for the amount of time I had with him, and he seemed to think that even this was revolutionary. Apparently in his twelve years of English study, no one bothered to teach him sentence structure.

Wednesday 6/10/09

Adults understand the theory behind English pronunciation and grammar better, but kids seem to be better able to pronounce sounds they’ve never heard.

Monday 6/15/09

The thing is, the children catch on pretty easily. It’s the adults who have problems. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t take much to correct pronunciation in kids, but the adults have so much trouble, and some can’t even hear the difference between the sound they make and the correct sound. I think the adults are too conditioned to make chinese sounds, whereas the children have not been speaking any language long enough to have that sort of predisposition. The initial mistakes that the children make, then, are very probably the result of the teacher’s mistakes, and what interests me is that if the teachers here were all native English speakers, since the children start learning English in second grade, they could be great at pronunciation by now. This is part of why I think that if we could teach the teachers (if it is still possible to correct them), that would be much more efficient.

Saturday 6/19/09