Hello,
I am a newish ESL teacher working with Brazilian Portuguese speaker from sale Paulo living here in New York for 10 years. She tends to drop the ends of 2 and 3-syllable words such as, e.g. part for party, move for movie, and document for documentary. In doing research online and in several books, I have seen reference to "elision of unstressed syllables at the ends of words". However, I have seen nothing about what a teacher can do to help student with this. My student seems to think she has said the syllable and is perplexed when people don't understand her. I have been stopped in conversation when she makes this error, also.
Have any more experienced teachers come across this and if so what have you done? I have done syllable work with her--but to no avail. What else would help?
Thank you for any help you can give me,
CplK
Brazilian Portuguese speaker syllable deletion
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