18 June 26
Shadow Learning
For over three years now I’ve been volunteering to coach an Iranian woman with her English through International House Davis. We have established a deep connection in our weekly sessions. (I have a deep love and respect for Iranian culture and was saddened to hear of Marjane Satrapi’s recent death not to mention the horrific violence inflicted on the country by the U.S.)
I have no ESL training and mostly my Iranian friend and I chat about whatever is going on, which sadly includes politics. But I recently learned about a technique for helping students improve their pronunciation called Shadowing. It goes like this: I read a paragraph in English, then I read the first sentence of the paragraph, which the student then repeats. When we get to the end of the paragraph, she re-reads the whole paragraph.
We are working our way through Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, a children’s novella about the immigrant experience in a depressed midwest inner-city area where people of different cultures are brought together to transform a vacant lot into a garden. Each chapter is written from a different point of view, and they are short enough that we can cover the chapter in the hour or so.
What is especially useful for language learners is that consistent trip-ups become very obvious with this method. English pronunciation of “th”, voiced and unvoiced(/θ/ and /ð/); /w/; and initial s+consonant are all difficult for speakers of Farsi (and Spanish, of course). More subtle are the vowels. I never actually thought about it but I pronounce the “e” in “the” differently whether it precedes a vowel or a consonant, and have been able to detect these minor hiccups and convey them to my friend. Of course my own pronunciation is different from that of native English speakers who have spent all their lives in the United States, so my “little” pronounces the “t’s” as “t’s,” not “d’s.” I hope my friend can live with that. She is delighted with this method, nonetheless, and we are making good progress.
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