Well today we decided to do something a little different. I
found some easy dialog, and used it for extensive reading with the plan of
working on proper stress of words, and tone in the sentences. Based on my past experiences,
I was guessing that we would have some trouble with questions, so I picked a list
of dialog that had a lot of asking involved. Seeing that we were almost starting
from scratch, I just started talking, and asking them about classes. I told them
to note the tone in my voice, and then had them ask me some of the same kind of
questions.
Even though we started off rough, they had been taught this stuff before,
but they never use it outside of class, because they all speak Arabic to each other.
They picked up on it, and we moved on to come role playing with the dialog. As
the dialog was being read I made note of the various thing they messed up on,
but I didn't really look at anything except tone in the sentence. They are not
very advanced, so I didn't want to pile on all the different things. Towards
the end, they really started grasping the concept of tone in questions, and it
got better. I told them to practice this outside of class during the week, and
that we would be doing a review on it when we got back together.
Hang in there! The idea of working with reading is smart with these guys. They need a lot of scaffolding for speech, and reading offers that. That's a good idea for getting them to start speaking at their level. Working on the rhythm of speaking my focusing on tone was also a good idea.
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