Miles TS#15

Monday June 22, 2015 - Today's tutoring session was designed to help Joseph with his pronunciation of past tense verbs and adjectives. Because there are slightly different sounds associated with past tense verb endings and because Joseph needs improvement with his pronunciation anyway, I thought that this would be a good lesson for him. I began by writing three words with three different past tense endings on the board: visited, worked, and stayed. I then explained to him that these three words have slightly different sounds for their endings. One is -id, another -t, and another -d. I explained further that the letters preceding the -ed ending dictate how the ending will actually sound. If the last letter in the verb is a t or d then it will have an -id ending sound; if the last letters are k, ss, sh,p, f, or c then it will have a -t ending sound; if the last letters are s, b, ll, m, n, r, v, w, y, z, or j then it will have a -d ending sound. Finally, I wrote a list of verbs on the board and asked Joseph to rewrite the verbs in the past tense underneath one of the three original words that I wrote in the beginning, depending on which ending sound group they fit into. At first, Joseph was confused, which is probably due to poor explanation on my part, but after I did a few examples for him, He caught on quickly. Also, whenever I heard him mispronounce any words, I would stop him and repeat the word three times so that he could hear the correct sounds. At the beginning of the lesson, Joseph did not pronunciation the endings differently, but by the end, he could tell the different sounds apart from each other and even separate the verbs into their corresponding groups.