This time we had a record low for number of people dropping out in the second week. It’s usually about 1/4th of the remaining students that drop out, but this time, it was only one person! And they dropped out by letting me know, instead of just not turning in homework.
This time, the quiz didn’t seem to make much of a difference. There was very little repeated use of it. I’m guessing that people found this quiz a lot less helpful.
Everyone struggled with the same three things: Letters that are pronounced differently inside of words, how to divide the words into syllables, and where to place stress – which is pretty much the entire lesson. There was a lot of groaning in the Skype chat about how difficult this lesson was too. After one student had me correct their homework in two stages, I think that I should restructure the lesson the way that we dealt with their homework, because their solution was pretty ingenious.
Train people to do the transcription in stages, instead of all at once, and use the same examples for every stage, so people can watch them gain more and more of the features.
- Teach how sounds are different inside of multi-syllable words. Don’t bring in syllable division at this point.
- Teach syllable division, using a lot more examples, with more explanations. Get into the linguistic theory behind it too… about how most languages structure syllables CV.
- Teach the placement of stress.
Then, I’d break the quiz into 2 parts Syllable division and Placement of stress. I’d have to make separate pages for the quizzes, since I can’t have two quizzes on the same page.
What do you think? Would this make it easier to learn?