Eric, one of my Skype lesson tutors, speaks flawless English with impeccably natural American accent. The perfection in his speech is such that I can easily imagine that he must be a great teacher for a pronunciation neutralization class in the Philippines. There are so many different reasons why I like him as a teacher, one of which is that he gives me corrective feedback on my speech every time I finish reading a discussion article aloud. He’s never easy on me, at least it feels so to me, but I very much appreciate his candor, the equivalent of which I won’ be able to find in any other tutors. To describe my oral rendition of a discussion article, he once said that he could see some kind of “urgency” in my speech. I was impressed with his sensible word choice of “urgency”. Yeah, that’s what it was. I wanted to get the picture of how the rate of speech that Eric considered as appropriate could sound like, so I asked him to read a couple of sentences in the first paragraph aloud and he kindly did that for me. Then I said to myself, “Oh, well, that’s the pace he wanted me to realize. And my speech is nothing compared to his, by the way!” His model speech was not at all urgent or fast, but intelligible and soothing to my ears. That’s what I should emulate. Two lessons later, the last night’s lesson in fact, I got “passed” from him. He told me that my speech was improved and I should keep that way of speech. In fact, he soon didn’t mention anything and tried moving onto comprehension questions, so I was like “Oh, I was not good enough to receive any comment. Gee…” Then, he was as though he had suddenly remembered what he had to say, and gave me such comment. If he had done it on purpose, he knew what to do as a skillful teacher for sure.
