I met with Sooungyu again just two days later on July 8th. We met in the Stormier library again. She had mentioned that she wanted to work on her pronunciation so that is what we did!
I prepared several sentences for her to read out loud in her best and most articulate pronunciation so that I could gauge which sounds she was having problems with. This exercise showed me exactly what I had predicted: she had the most trouble with L verses R sounds as well as I verses EE sounds. I anticipated this because I had researched pronunciation problems among Korean speakers.
I showed Soongyu a chart of minimal pairs. Some of them she did not have a problem with at all while others were very challenging. I asked her to read the pairs and I would correct her if necessary. She began but quickly stopped and asked if I would read them first and she could repeat. I thought this was interesting. I think she was embarrassed that she would say the words completely wrong and wanted an example to work from. She felt comfortable with more support. I agreed and we proceeded this way. We stopped at the pairs she had problems with and practiced repeating them several times. I broke down the words into their most basic sounds. We practiced those sounds separately before putting them all together. I think this helped her considering she was able to say the words correctly after breaking them down.
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