Hi Robert,

I would be happy to help you, if I can!

When you're teaching short words like cat, dog etc, it's best to group them via sounds, for example, ten, pen, hen. If you get his focus on one sound group at a time, you can then blend that with starting letters to form well pronounced words. Or you can focus on the vowel sound, for example the /i/ sound, -ig, -ip, -in etc.

This is a video I made of a Chinese YL class I had of 5-6 year old students. This was at the end of eight months of teaching, from no L2 to what you see in the video. Please note, this was a goodbye video I made for the kids when I left the school, so a lot of it is us being silly, but there is a section where we play a phoneme identifying game, that you could use with your student. Basically, you drill the sound group, then give the student/s cards with those sounds, you say a sound and they have to hold up the corresponding written sound, a simple instant reward scheme like simply saying 'ding ding ding' to signify the correct selection is a wonderful motivator, and this gets the child to associate the sound with the written word and will do wonders for both their pronunciation and their reading ability (as you will see from the students in the video, featured readers are 3 students going from lower ability in the class, to middle, to top).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lsGSgeOtk

If your student is having trouble with adding the 'ah' sound at the end of a word, you can try the chopping method. Have him hold his hand up to his mouth and literally 'chop' the word where you want him to finish, this helps to focus the student on the end sound and after a while should eliminate the 'eh' sound that you're hearing.

For the numeracy problem, there are a few things you can try. Obviously drilling is the first thing you should try. Build it in to your class so the first thing you do at the start of each session is count to 20 together. You can also use flash cards to have him order the numbers, saying each as you place them. TPR can also help with this, try associating a specific action or movement to the number and once he connect the sound to the action, vocab recall is much better. Again, repetition is key at this age, so building a routine in to the start of each lesson with give him structure and help him to remember the bits he finds trickier!

A great site for helping with pron issues is www.starfall.com - it has some wonderful interactive games that young learners love.

I hope this has helped a little, let me know how you get on!