Reflection Of Lesson 1

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, timecontrolling, 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.