I tutored again today.
The boy, as usual these days, is doing well, but the girl didn't finish her homework -- again. Granted, there isn't much time when one lesson is on Sunday and the next one is on Monday, but I tutored Sunday morning, so she had all afternoon to do it. I asked her why she didn't, and she said it got late.
I think the stones in the jar aren't the incentive that the lollipops were. The boy doesn't even remind me to put his into the jar. I think he's doing well now because he has matured and also because he can finally surpass his sister at something academic. The things I especially praised him on today were his diction, which has really improved, and his handwriting, which is now totally legible, instead of me having to guess what he wrote.
As for diction, both kids have problems saying "s" at the end of a word. I asked them if Chinese didn't distinguish between plural and singular, wondering if that's why, but no, it does, they tell me. I guess they don't hear the English words precisely, and a reasonable facsimile has worked for them, so they just don't pronounce things as precisely as I'd like. I think the boy is beginning to understand how pronouncing things right will make it easier for him to make the correct grammatical choices and speak correctly. I told them a while ago that my hopes are that they can speak English as well as an American, with no accent, and Chinese the same. I think the boy is taking this to heart.
The girl is still too young or not as advanced as the boy, so she is having less success, but she is now where the boy was when I started tutoring him a year and a half ago, so she is actually way ahead of him, since he's in 4th grade and she's in 2nd grade. Today, she caught on right away to adding an "e" to a short-vowel word like "sit" which makes it another long-vowel word like "site." She seemed really excited about learning this!
One problem the girl has is learning how a word ending in "ed" is pronounced. Like there's "pit" which becomes "pitted" where you pronounce the "ed" separately, and then there's "laugh" that becomes "laughed," where it's all together, one syllable. I've been looking for a rule to this -- I just know how to pronounce them -- and I found sites that stated there were 3 different pronunciations, where the "ed" is pronounced "t." I just thought we were sloppy about pronouncing it as "d." So I'm not sure, myself, which are the "d" and the "t" ones. What is "laughed,"for instance? I think it must be one of those under the "t" heading.
Verbs are the hardest thing. And I've only dealt with the simple past, present, and future till just recently I started the boy on the present continuous, where you use a helping verb with "ing": "I am going" instead of "I go."
Aargh! Grammar was never my strong point. I just learned to speak grammatically and did what sounded right, so I got the answers right enough to get good marks in English. Now I really have to learn the nuts and bolts to teach it.
