My second tutoring session with Felix focused mostly on
pronunciation. Because Felix is already high level, I brought with me a
linguistics textbook I had used in one of my classes in order to show him the
diagrams of how different sounds are pronounced (i.e. position of the tongue,
teeth, lips, etc.). To start with, I gave him a list of minimal pairs for a few
different sounds that Spanish-speakers often have the most difficulty with when
they learn English (<b> and <v>, <y> and <j>, short
<i> and long <e>, <d> and <t> at the ends of words). I
then read aloud one word from each minimal pair and asked him to circle the
word he heard. I reviewed his answers and then spent time going over the
differences in the sounds he had the most difficulty with. We spent a good
amount of time on <b> vs. <v> because Felix expressed that it was
frustrating trying to get English speakers to spell his last name Varas
correctly when he couldn’t distinguish the sounds (i.e. Varas instead of
Baras). Seeing the phonetic breakdown seemed to help him better pronounce the
<v> sound.
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