Hi there, dear visitors. This post is about minimal pair drills. Yes, those "boring" and "silly" exercises! That's what people say (at least most of them). However, I have dealt with them (applying this technique in class) for quite a while and noticed they are not like that at all.
We know how difficult it is to have our students pronounce the English sounds correctly. They mispronounce them repeatedly because they just can't realize, most of the times, the difference they have comparing to their mother tong as well as if compared to other similar sounds in English. And that's exactly when it comes to be pretty useful for us to adopt minimal pair drills.
As soon as one gets to practice, hearing and pronouncing, two words that only differ by just one sound (minimal pairs), the distance between these sounds gets highlighted by their peculiarities (points of articulation, manner of articulation, intensity). In addition, the words which compound the minimal pairs provide the phonemes being analyzed with a context, by their meanings themselves or through the sentences they may come in.
In this concern, exercises like
berry x very (a great confusion to Spanish speakers)
rice x lice (which may be challenging to Japanese people)
pen x pan (a "karma" to Brazilians)
can be of great help, as the problematic sounds are precisely contrasted and adequately contextualized by words, which would be funny in exemples like
He's a berry nice fellow
I'm starving. I want to eat some lice.
I'll use the new pen to cook.
As to students' first language interference, minimal pair drills help achieve the necessary accuracy of the sounds in focus so that these can be efficiently distinguished from the learner's native ones.
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