Greg - CP #3

One of Jodie's CP's really wanted another session Friday, but she was already scheduled with a second student.  Therefore, Marco met with me.  He is from Peru and is a little beyond the age of traditional students.  Marco and I went to a classroom at 12:30 and didn't exit until 1:45. 

He was focused.  While we did some introductory conversation, Marco went right for his school notes and pulled out a pronunciation worksheet with rows and rows of single spaced verbs.  The task: practicing the pronunciation of past tense verbs that end in the sounds "t," "d," or "id."  Of course, this included the use of many areas of knowledge and the practice of many English language skills.  We dealt with new vocabulary - both pronunciation and the production of example sentences.  We also spent a lot of time working on various difficulties with pronunciation that derive, I believe, from his mother tongue (rolling the "r" like a fluttering "l," words ending in "g" sounding like a "k," confusion of "p" with "b" and "v" with "f," and so on). 

Nothing phased Marco.  Every correction was like giving him a piece of candy instead of a sour grape.  He kept his hand on his throat or in front of his lips - whichever would be the place defining whether or not he was producing the right result.  He repeated over and over the practice of "great" instead of "glllleat."  In fact, I challenged him to encourage everyone in his path this weekend using that word. (For example: Thank you for the great service.  The food was great.  You look great.)

I was surprised by his default usage of the word "assume" as we practiced his use of the "d" sound in "assumed."  He created a sentence about assuming responsibility for something.  I praised him on that, and taught him how we make educated guesses about things, such as "I assumed you had been in America a long time, because you speak English so well."  We practiced many words in the context of sentences to see if his corrected pronunciations would stick when stuck in a sentence. 

Marco was a rewarding CP.  What we did really amounted to a tutoring session, but it was not like taking medicine for him.  It was food he was waiting to devour.  I suspect his motivation is far, far from fading.

Leaving his session an hour and a half before a session with my foundation level CP has encouraged me to take some scaffolding in the form of worksheets to next week's visit with that CP.  (See Greg - CP #4 for more on that one.)