Serher and I spent a little bit of time talking about a History Channel show about Turkey, in an effort to give her more practice speaking. She has very good English, but always says that it isn't that good and is very hard for her to use. Outside of class or our meetings, she rarely gets the chance to practice much. I really wanted to her feel more comfortable speaking automatically and with little effort, since this is the area she complains about most--that sometimes other people seem to not understand what she is saying. I had noticed how much faster her English gets when playing Taboo and I had a hunch the same type of thing would happen in normal conversation. By that, I mean that if I got her talking about something she was very interested in, she would 'forget English' and focus on the topic, thus smoothing her English out considerably. It worked. :)
I got her to tell me her experiences about visiting some of the sites listed in the documentary, such as the ancient fortress in Cappadocia which has been lived in continuously for 7,000 years--the world's record for the longest inhabited man made structure. At first, she was a little hesitant, at least until she realized that I was indeed interested to hear about her stories. After that, she seemed to loosen up and over the next 10 minutes, her speaking got faster and almost native like at time. At other times, not so much. But doing this gave me the chance to 'hear' the difference in her speech.
Eventually, I determined that what she was really noticing was that when people 'didn't understand her'--it wasn't her English that confused them, it was her intonation! She was, at times, still very much speaking English through her 'Turkish filter', just like the articles in TEFL II discussed. Once I realized this, I explained to her what I'd been learning in TEFL II and the ITA Pronunciation class. In Turkish, Serher explained that most words are spoken the same--no stress on individual syllables. I explained that in English, one syllable is usually stressed over the others. It was interesting to note that when speaking with me or another native speaker, Seher's English (after several minutes) began to almost unconsciously mimic ours--she would start to stress some syllables, but this was usually only in words that she'd just recently heard. We discussed how she needed to exaggerate stressing in English so, over time, her brain would equate a stressed pattern with English, similar to how my Korean coworker taught me to say "hello" in Korean. (The first time I said it correctly, I 'sounded American' to her. She told me "ok, good, but now say it like a Korean says it" and she greatly exaggerated the word into what I heard as almost comical proportions. It sounded silly to me, but every Korean since has said my pronunciation was surprisingly perfect.) In time, I told Serher the over-the-top exaggerations would smooth out to be 'normal English', thought it would still likely sound 'funny' to her since her Turkish Language filter pattern doesn't match so-to-speak.
I gave her several sentences to repeat and her intonation sounded fairly accurate to me, but sounded 'extremely silly' to her. We ended with both of us wanted to explore English in songs as a way to naturally pick up intonation patterns. I also thought of practicing Nursery Rhymes, since Dr. Grill had said in the ITA Pronunciation class that the universal purpose of Nursery Rhymes was to instill culturally relevant morals and speech/intonation patterns into small children as a way for them to learn language.
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