I’m teaching a high school student at an Eikaiwa one-to-one who has a problem with speech.
She tends to mumble quite quietly and skips over multiple phonemes. She’s lower intermediate in terms of knowledge and can definitely communicate but she has these intermittent lapses in concentration that can make it very difficult. It’s the same with her grammar.
I apologize for my hearing and ask her to repeat herself but I find having to do this several times a lesson very awkward. Then again so is nodding along and trying to change the subject (students can see through it when I do that and hate it). Telling her straight up that her diction needs to improve seems a bit too direct and another cause of friction, particularly as I consider the problem to be rooted partly in confidence. I present the issue as one of confidence – as in she should talk with more confidence and conviction – in my written reports to her, but it’s a bit too vague and not really solving the issue.
What’s the best way to proceed?
12 comments
Ideally it would be nice if everyone talked loudly, clearly and with confidence. But you can’t force anyone to be that way. All you can do is encourage and praise really.
I can only speak to this anecdotally, but whenever I had a mumbler in my Eikaiwa days a large part of that lack of confidence simply came from not being in a place they were entirely “settled” into and around people they were entirely comfortable with.
That isn’t to say she is stressed or dislikes the environment, it may just be the case that she takes much longer to acclimatize. Of course that’s assuming she wants to make the effort to become more comfortable with the environment at all, some kids are just afraid to make that initial effort with new people and places. I suppose that’s where you’ll need more guided activities and direction to give her opportunities to become more comfortable.
If its individual, one thing I use to do was making us sit at each ends of a table the long way. Then I just go about class as normal letting the awkwardness of communication over the distance fix the problem.
Since it’s a private lesson, I would ramp up the hand-holding. For example, clearly enunciate “yes, I do” “no, I don’t,” have her repeat it back to you until you’re satisfied that she can pronounce it credibly enough that even a non-sympathetic listener would have no trouble understanding her, then ask her a question that would correspond to what you practiced (“do you like winter?”) and have her answer. Repeat for as long as is necessary with a variety of simple, predictable questions and answers.
This approach bolsters the confidence of shyer students (because they know how to answer “correctly”) and provides the opportunity for more confident students to expand upon a correct grammatical foundation. I find that it rarely takes longer than a month before the student —who previously had poor elocution or jumbled up word-order— is able to naturally answer nearly any basic question and even begin adding extra details (“do you like winter?” “yes I do, because snowy.” “yes, I do because it’s snowy.” “yes, I do because it’s snowy.”)
This probably won’t help, but miracles do happen. It’ll also sound unnecessarily complicated.
In 2020, I picked up a microphone app for my ipod that sends the sounds it hears to my bluetooth speaker. This was because of the social distancing, and that some of my students are terribly shy.
It did require allowing everyone to play with it a few times, but eventually things settled down. A favorite game was to step out into the hall with the speaker and repeat what the student holding the ipod said.
ask the counselor to say it nicely for you, or a japanese teacher who knows how to give advice to student in Japanese
Does the student also speak this way in Japanese? If so, it may be a bit more complicated.
Some students I have taught with autism in eikaiwa and also in the UK who have had this issue with not speaking clearly or speaking too quickly to be understood. Often in Japan we are never told (or students are not assessed for) special educational needs, but if it is a possibility in your case it would need to be handled a bit more delicately than if it was just a lack of confidence.
My general tips are:
– Setting clear expectations and making sure they are understood.
– Demonstrate what you expect in terms of tone, volume, speed and so on. Giving an example, having them listen, repeat and practice until they do it correctly (may take many sessions, so do 5 mins or so each lesson at the beginning and make it a routine.) remind them of it when the revert back to their usual speaking style.
– Encouraging and praising generously with clear feedback.
Spray bottle.
Explain clearly to her what you expect of her at the end of each task and each lesson; and how you are going to reach those outcomes (what tasks we are doing today, and why short and long-term). If possible with specific checkable criteria. “Eikaiwa” is really abstract and a student might have no idea why, or what they are studying, often it is expecting output with zero input.
This way you can give her a self-assessment checklist to do after each task, or lesson. One of the criteria can be “I spoke clearly” or “I enunciated individual words clearly”. Then ask her to grade herself from 1-4 or similar. Chat with her about the score at the end, and give your feedback too. Clearly define each scoring level, but do it positively – so a score of 1 is along the lines of “can be improved by . . . .”
Review what you did at the end of the lesson and at the start of the next lesson. Tie in the next lesson to the previous lesson. Make sure the criteria are stretching the student, but are achievable within a set timeframe.
Sounds like she might just be sitting there waiting for time to run out.
Why not focus on pronunciation and diction in the lesson? You have a great deal of flexibility in one on one lessons, take advantage of it. Repeat after me, read aloud, shadowing, etc. Work on her problem areas instead of just trying to get her to talk.
Let ’em mumble on… but encourage them and compliment them as they go. It could be anything including (purely as examples) their personality, self-confidence (a biggie in Japan) or some sorta condition (which I wouldn’t go jumping to conclusions about – you just need to be positive and inclusive).
FWIW I had this young girl (a champion ice skater… like many high achievers, very shy/modest) who asked for 1-on-1 classes with me and insisted that she really enjoyed English. Despite this she said pretty well nothing, gave few facial expressions and just mumbled out weak answers to all of the questions I asked (with me doing all the work). Then one day… she started speaking VERY confidently and our ‘lessons’ ended up involving us just chatting about stuff for an hour. I dunno what she was going through but I assume she had a LOT going on and was probably VERY tired (she’d had training from maybe 6am, a full day of school, more training after school and then an English lesson… she never fell asleep but woulda been REALLY tired IMO!) Eventually she got over a bump in life and became a lot more confident. Happens… all I can suggest is not going down the path of trying to diagnose people and label them. Just keep at it and be genki.
> …tends to mumble quite quietly and skips over multiple phonemes. She’s lower intermediate in terms of knowledge and can definitely communicate but she has these intermittent lapses in concentration that can make it very difficult. It’s the same with her grammar.
I think you’re describing my japanese.