On Wednesday after
tutoring, I met up with Neto at Starbucks. I asked him how his presentation on me went.
He used the interview questions from our last meeting to make a PowerPoint
presentation, and he showed it to me. It was really well done! Neto told me
about his trip to Miami to see a soccer game over the weekend. He told me that
there are so many Portuguese speakers there as well as Spanish speakers, and I
wasn’t aware of that. Maybe it was because a lot of Brazilians were there to
see the game. Next, he pulled out a sheet with pronunciation exercises on it.
The directions were for the students to practice different tongue twisters with
their conversation partners. Neto needed to work on the “r” and “h” section the
most because Portuguese speakers have the most trouble with that. The ‘r’ is
pronounced as an ‘h’ for them. We took turns. He had to go really slowly at
first on some of them, but when I modeled how to do it first he got the hang of
it. Then, he gave me his journal and told me to write down some more English
words that start with ‘r’ for him to practice. He made some contributions as
well. Things like this show me that Neto is trying hard to get better everyday.
Neto still seems a bit flustered while speaking, but I am patient and try to
make him feel comfortable by giving him time to figure out how to communicate
his thoughts to me. He asks me for clarification on how to say certain words or
form verbs according to subject, so I’m glad he feel comfortable doing this.
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