Kersten TS #16

On Wednesday, March 8, I met with my adult tutee Xiaoyu at 3:30pm in Dirac library. She had to read more of her article that we went over the previous day, but while we were going over the parts she didn’t understand, the topic of pronunciation came up. She said she had a hard time pronouncing the word snack because she would sometimes accidentally pronounce it snake. I told her some rules on pronunciation. In most cases, for simple words, if a word has a vowel and ends in a consonant, the vowel is pronounced with the short sound. But if there is a vowel in the word, and the word also ends in a vowel, then the first vowel is pronounced with a long sound. She didn’t know what the short and long vowel sounds were, so I went over each of them for each letter. I then pulled up a list of example words online and asked her to read through them. Her pronunciations were great, but I noticed she had a problem pronouncing the short “I” sound. For example, she would pronounce the word “mint” as “meent” because she kept pronouncing the short “I” sound as a long “e” sound. I went over the correct pronunciations with her until she got the hang of it, and told her to work on it over spring break.