Teacher's guide
How to run the six weeks — what to protect, and where students get stuck.
What this course actually is
A listening course. The student's problem is not vocabulary and not grammar — it is decoding fast connected speech. Almost every student who arrives will describe it as “they talk too fast,” and almost every one of them already knows the words.
24 self-study sessions, four a week for six weeks, 30–45 minutes each. Session 2 of every week is the Pronunciation Workshop. At least six in-person hours, one per week, each with its own guide page.
The Couldn't-Catch List is the syllabus
Every session asks the student to write down what they did hear whenever they fail to understand something. That running list is what your hours are built from.
The clinic method, used in every class guide:
- Ask what they did hear.
- Say the full sentence at natural speed.
- Say it slowly, showing the glue and the crushed words.
- Say it at natural speed again. Ask whether it sounds different now.
Three recordings, six weeks apart
Week 1 records a baseline — a fixed paragraph plus ninety seconds of free speech. Week 3 records the midpoint. Week 6 records the final.
- Record at the start of the hour, before any teaching.
- Do not correct anything during a recording.
- Play them back to back and say nothing until the student speaks first.
- Do not let them rehearse the paragraph beforehand.
Week by week, and what each hour is for
| Week | What it does |
|---|---|
| 1 · One Long Word | Linking, stress, reduction. ★ baseline.Workshop: the loud syllable |
| 2 · Two People Talking | Overlap, backchannels, restarts, fillers.Workshop: vowel length |
| 3 · Questions Aimed at You | Knowing it landed; the repair kit. ★ midpoint.Workshop: -ed, -s, final consonants |
| 4 · Three or More Voices | Groups, floor-taking. The hardest week.Workshop: TH, V/W, L/R |
| 5 · Out in the World | Counters, ordering, phones.Workshop: numbers, dates, names |
| 6 · Everything at Once | Their own patterns. ★ final.Workshop: whatever their list says |
Week 4 needs a warning, in advance
Three or more voices is genuinely much harder than two. Students reliably conclude in Week 4 that they have stopped improving, and some quietly disengage.
The site already warns them in the Week 3 class guide and again at the top of Week 4 Session 1. Say it out loud as well, at the start of the Week 4 hour. Three minutes spent naming it saves the back half of the course.
Working with Nepali and Chinese speakers
Each Workshop has a block that changes with the student's first language, set once and remembered on the device. The shared spine is that English throws away its unstressed syllables — both Nepali and Mandarin are far more syllable-even, so students are listening for syllables that were never fully said.
| Group | What actually causes the misses |
|---|---|
| Nepali speakers | v/w merge · clusters broken by an inserted vowel · lakh/crore regroupingTH is usually closer than for most learners |
| Chinese speakers | only -n and -ng allowed at syllable end · l/r (and n/l in some dialects) · 万/亿 regroupingvowel length is a brand-new cue, not a refinement |
If you only meet once a week
The self-study track is fully independent, so a thin contact schedule does not break it. When the hour is tight:
- Keep the Couldn't-Catch clinic and the recordings.
- Convert live dictation drills into recorded audio the student does at home.
- Drop the review sections — the site already handles review.
Where students actually get stuck
- Stopping when they hear a backchannel. They treat mm-hm as an interruption and break their own turn. Week 2 names it; you will still need to drill it.
- Refusing to interrupt. Many find it rude. Address it directly: in American group conversation, waiting for a clear gap means never speaking, and silence reads as having nothing to say rather than as courtesy.
- Asking for the whole sentence again. Push them to name the gap — “you went where?” — which gets a better repeat and shows they followed the rest.
- Over-pronouncing unstressed syllables. The fix is to make the small syllables smaller, not the loud ones louder.
- Treating a request for a repeat as failure. Reframe it: reading a number back is what competent professionals do in their own language every day.
The last hour
Week 6 has no fixed content by design. The student arrives with three named patterns and a bucket count they produced from their own list, and you teach to those.
If their three look wrong to you, say so and show your evidence — but let their list win unless you can point at something specific. Six weeks of their own data beats one hour of your impression.