February 10

Minimal Pair Tongue Twisters

During a speaking activity the other day, I heard one of my B1 adults say /ʃaɪld/. This isn’t uncommon in our corner of Andalucía, where the /tʃ/ phoneme is often pronounced /ʃ/ and in fact during my Diploma, I chose that specific problem for my phonology presentation. Seeing a teachable moment, I quickly jotted down some minimal pairs with those sounds on the board.
We drilled the words individually and some students commented on how difficult they found it to differentiate between the two sounds.
I then asked them to write a sentence in pairs using as many of the words as possible and you can see their ideas in the picture below.
We then practised the sentences as a class and in pairs – and even I found it difficult to say them at speed!

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Posted February 10, 2015 by Teresa Bestwick in category Uncategorized

1 thoughts on “Minimal Pair Tongue Twisters

  1. Teresa Bestwick (Post author)

    Just as a little add-on, I decided not to get bogged down with error correction at this point – I think going into the structure of “wish” would have been an unnecessary and confusing tangent from a tangent!

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