Not Just Beer and Kung Fu

We've put up all these photos of drinking beer, singing karaoke, visiting the big buddha and learning Kung Fu, that I thought I would take some time to let you know that we're actually teaching too! We're having a great time in the classroom--the students here are lots of fun to teach. Most of them are really enthusiastic and eager to improve and practice their English. Michael and I have both noticed that even when we're feeling lethargic or a bit blah before class or office hours, working with the students always leaves us feeling reenergized and in a good mood (a little different than my days at Webb!).

We've been working on roleplays in all of our classes. Whenever our classes don't overlap Michael and I go to each other's to perform short little scenes from a restaurant or job interview, etc. We teach the students some key vocabulary and then they come up with their own skits in small groups. There have been some really creative and funny ones so far, like the fly-in-the-soup restaurant scene where the fly turned out to be the manager's pet and she came over to talk to it.

In addition to our own classes we've also been visiting some of the other teacher's classes, since most of their students have never had a foreign teacher before. We've put together a little multi-media presentation (Ok, it's just photos and music, but 'mulit-media' sounds better) about our families, our wedding and our trip. It's been interesting and fun to try to explain all these different things to students with very limited English (these students are Japanese or Korean majors who haven't learned much English). Michael does a lot of drawing on the board and we've also had to act out a few things. Our most popular performances include me trick-or-treating on Halloween as either a ghost or a frog (depending on whether I have my scarf or hooded green jacket along with me), as well as Michael's demonstration of how people carry things on their heads in Africa and India (again my scarf comes in handy for this). Oh yeah, and Michael likes the face I make to show the meaning of 'gruesome' when we tell the story about Shah Jahan cutting off the thumbs of the workers who built the Taj Mahal.

After dinner we sometimes go back to the teacher's office to offer extra help to students if they need it (They all study in their classrooms until 8:30). The students mostly seem to want help with their pronunciation. You'd think this would be easy for us, being native speakers and all, but last night we ran into some difficulties. Michael and I discovered that we say the 'l' sound differently, specifically when it's in the final position in a word, like 'will' or 'fall'. It wasn't that noticible until we slowed down and exaggerated it, and found that our tongues do completely different things.

We spent a while debating and demonstrating in front of the poor student, who probably just became more confused. We continued the debate back in our room, and the only thing we could agree on was that the English 'l' is different from the German 'l' (English 'will' vs. German 'will' (want)). We concluded that it must be a difference in regional accent. Either that, or else ONE of us just learned to say HIS (or her) 'l's the wrong way. So how about a little survey? What does your tongue do when you say the 'l' sound, especially when it's in the last sound in a word? Does it touch the back of your teeth or does it curl up in the back of your mouth in some weird way so that you actually kind of swallow the sound? (No bias here!)