Several Salamanca students say silly sayings. Yep, that is pretty much what we did this week in my internship! At this rate in semester and my internship, I feel as though I am running short on fun activities to do with my students that focus solely on the speaking aspects of learning the English language. But, thank goodness for the other two students who are also doing this internship with me, because this week’s lesson using tongue twisters to focus on English pronunciation was conjured up by one of them.

Although we did play around with tongue twisters, we also had some real learning to do! We started the class with a PowerPoint that focused on English pronunciation. We talked about topics, like minimal pairs, verbal stress, and connotation. Woo, so exciting! Some of the vocabulary that we discussed was indeed quite tedious, but the students seemed to be quite interesting in the topics. They seemed especially intrigued that stressing different words in a sentence can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Like, stressing “I did not tell her that” would mean that you did not tell her but someone else could have told her. Whereas stressing “I did not tell her that” implies you could have told someone else about something, but not her. My students seemed to like this concept a lot, and I am glad they were receptive of this lesson.

After going through slide after slide, we switched gears to practice some tongue twisters to help draw attention to the importance of the pronunciation of each word. I showed the students two of my favorite tongue twisters, Peter Piper and Woodchuck. I first read the tongue twister aloud to show off my impressive pronounciation skills, or so I thought. Me being me, I tripped up my words and made a mistake with the tongue twisters in front of all my students. But hey, I suppose that shows that mistakes are okay, even a native English speaker! 

Once I made a fool of myself, we then practice saying both of the tongue twisters aloud as a class. We said them quite slowly at first, but I then open up the floor for my students to say them individually if they wanted. I only had a few students that wanted to say them aloud, but they did really well overall. 

After practicing, it was the students’ turn to show me what they were made of. The students were split up into small groups of two to four students and were responsible for making their very own tongue twisters that they would have to perform for the class. Some students acted as though they were incompetent and did not know how to write one. I find that I have to continually encourage my students to do their work to the best of their ability. They tend to lack confidence when it comes to certain activities, and I feel as though I remind them a lot that they can do it and that it is not a big deal to make mistakes, and so on. However, I realize it is part of my job to do that. I am there to teach, but I am also there to encourage and nurture the development of each of my students so I do not mind.

So despite their fears, each group got up and performed their little tongue twisters. All of the students did just fine–just what I asked them to do. But, some of the groups did amazing. One of the groups on Wednesday spewed out a very complex and goofy tongue twister that was better than any tongue twister I could make up! It is safe to say that I was quite impressed, and we had a good class. 

Now, I only have two weeks left with my students. As much of a time commitment as it is to plan and go teach, I will miss my students and advising professors a lot. It has been such a wonderful experience, and I hope these next two weeks in Salamanca go by slowly. I just cannot fathom leaving this precious city, my new home.