Location: Skype
Listening
Tonight's listening exercise was about the peculiar American celebration of Groundhog Day. Cultural dimension? Oh yeah! I took the news item sound file from http://learningenglish.voanews.com/ . It's a good source of news and current events spoken slowly. Since my 2T was a meteorologist in the Korean Air Force during his national service, he found the idea of a rodent (one of the vocabulary words) predicting the weather humorous, as I thought he would. We listened to the story twice. I asked him to summarize. He did. I introduced the vocabulary that he had trouble with. We listened to the story again. I asked questions to test comprehension. I am surprised at the speed of his vocabulary acquisition. He also seems to have a natural ear for idiom. We spend a short bit of time (approx. 5 min or so) introducing idioms, Americanisms, and colloquial expressions at the end of every lesson. Meet with a smile, part with a smile.
One of the listening problems my 2T expressed was distinguishing between can and can't. He cannot always hear the voiceless alveolar plosive, "T" in normal conversation. He asked me for guidance. The best I could offer was to evaluate the context and consider body language when visual cues are available. Does anybody have any suggestions for this? Most of his English conversation is via Skype which carries with it a certain loss of sound quality.
At the end of this session (and every session) I send my 2T copies of all the files and materials we used during the session for his review and use.
If any of these materials would be useful to others of you, I'll be happy to share them. Just ping me.
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