Greg - TP - Adult # 5

Two of my three tutees showed up yesterday.  The other forgot it was Wednesday (probably due to the Monday holiday shortening the week).  We had a useful time together.  We again used the 3 subject approach to our time together:  pronunciation, grammar, and culture.

Pronunciation dealt with how we shorten some of our verbs in speech.  They were familiar with the subject, but needed some help with producing the correct sounds, especially my tutee from Korea.  Give me (gimme), have to (hafta), let me (lemme), got to (gotta), and other verbs that we shorten in speech were practiced with sentences that we made up or that were on our short video exercise.  Practiced alone, they could imitate the sounds of these verbs.  However, when spoken within a complete sentence, the multiple dynamics that are involved in producing an entire sentence caused the correct sound of the shortened verb or some other portion of the sentence to fall into miss-pronunciation.  We would then work on those problem words.

Our grammar lesson was with the present perfect continuous.  We worked on constructing positive statements, positive questions, negative statements, and negative questions using this verb tense.  We did a lot of work on the white board, as well as setting up situations and having one ask the question and the other answer.  For example, I would say, "You've been in a classroom all morning that has no windows.  Saif comes in wet with an umbrella.  What question can you (Sangyi) ask Saif using the present perfect continuous tense?"  This would be her chance to say "How long has it been raining?" to which Saif should reply, "It has been raining for 2 hours."  We did a lot of this covering positive and negative examples, as well as discussing how this form is often used as a complaint (You haven't been playing too much, have you?)

Lastly, we listened to a short audio presentation about Thanksgiving. We discussed the foods and, in particular, the difference between white and dark meat.  A lot of people in this world just can't figure out why we Americans like to eat that dry and smelly bird meat!  I have run into that everywhere I have lived outside of the States.  I think we chose turkey because fish couldn't hold enough stuffing!  What do you think?