Today we started class with an pairs activity just to get you thinking about all five front vowels. I handed each pair a set of five cards. On those cards were printed the words "bet, bit, bat, bait and beat." Your job was to put them in order from highest in the mouth to lowest in the mouth. I told you that you would need to put your hands on your jaws to figure this out. Ina and Rose got it right the second time, once they moved the word "bit."
Pretty much everyone got the highest and lowest, but the middle ones were harder! I hope this exercise got you to thinking about how we pronounce vowels.
Next we did choral repetition with a 5-column chart of words. We practiced saying lead, lid, laid, led, lad and dean, din, Dane, den, Dan. And so on. This was an excellent exercise for seeing which sound you are having the most trouble with. We noticed that our Arabic speakers have trouble with the /I/ sound as in "sill." I'm glad Lina stayed after class to have me work with her some more on this sound.
For the next activity, we put a bunch of words into the correct column according to the vowel sound. Be careful, you can't always go by spelling. That's English, I'm afraid.
Finally, we listened to a dialogue. Then you had me read it, and then two pairs had time to perform it before we adjourned. Don't worry, we will pick up where we left off on Thursday.
Tomorrow is computer lab day, and Wednesday is our conversation circle. I hope you will work on your front vowels in the lab tomorrow. You could also work on sentence stress.
Cheers!
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