Friday, February 26, 2010

Minimal Pair Pronunciation Lesson

Minimal Pair Pronunciation Lesson


Minimal pairs are pairs of words that have one phonemic change between them. For example: "let" and "lit". Using these pairs to help students recognize the minor differences between English muted vowel sounds can greatly help not only pronunciation skills, but also comprehension.


Aim: Improve pronunciation and recognition skills


Activity: The use of minimal pairs to help students distinguish minor differences between English vowel sounds.


Level: Pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate depending on students' capabilities .


Outline:



  • Introduce the idea of "minimal pairs" by writing a list on the board of a number of minimal pairs. For example: but - boot, sit - set, caught - cut, sing - song, etc.

  • Practice comprehension skills by using the provided lists of minimal pairs. Each list contains one minimal pair with a number of examples.

  • Once students are comfortable with the sounds, read sentence examples (for example: The call took a long time to go through - for the first pair) using one word of the pair provided. Ask students to identify which word of each pair was used.

  • Continue using the list of pairs by asking students to practice the lists.

  • Ask students to identify two vowel sounds which they want to focus on, for example: 'eh' and 'uh', and have them create their own list of minimal pairs.
    Have pairs exchange lists and practice reading the others' lists aloud.

  • If appropriate, continue lesson by a more extended look into the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)

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