Week 2 · With your teacher

Live class guide

For the teacher, and for the student to read before class.

60 minutes

Warm-up: last week's dictation list

5 minutes

Re-run three or four sentences from the Week 1 live drill. They should be noticeably easier. Say so out loud — visible progress this early matters more than the drill itself.

Couldn't-Catch clinic

20 minutes · protect this

Same method as Week 1. This week the list should include the blanks from the student's fifteen-second Ben Franklin exercise, marked W2-S3.

Those marked entries are gold — the student already listened ten times and still could not get them. Start there, not with the casual entries.

Two-voice dictation

15 minutes

Read both halves of a short exchange at natural speed, changing your voice slightly for each speaker. Have the student write down who said what. Build in the week's features:

“Didja talk to 'im yet?” / “Yeah, I'm gonna call 'im back.”
“Whatcha doin' Saturday?” / “Nothin' much — why, what's up?”
“I thought you said she'd already left.” / “Mm-hm. She did.”

Then write them out in full. Point at every dropped h and every reduced word.

Overlap practice

12 minutes

Tell a two-minute story. The student's only job is to put backchannels on top of you — mm-hm, yeah, oh really, wow — without stopping you.

Then swap. The student tells a story and you backchannel. Watch whether they stop talking each time you make a noise. Most students do at first. Name it and try again.

For quieter students this feels rude. Say plainly that in American conversation silence while someone talks reads as not listening, not as politeness.

Vowel length check

5 minutes

Play the Workshop 2 recording. Say each pair yourself and have the student point at which one you said, with the word list hidden.

For Chinese speakers this is the highest-value minute in the hour — vowel length is a brand-new cue. For Nepali speakers, check they are not treating it as fixed vowel length.

Set the week ahead

3 minutes

Four sessions before the next class. Flag that Week 3's class includes a midpoint recording, so the Week 1 baseline should be to hand.

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