We were instructed to create a pronunciation activity for Unit 2 in our Listening and Speaking class. We were told that the activity should address a pronunciation problem that we noticed in a speech sample that we were given to analyze. One of the problems I noticed was that the speaker had was distinguishing between vowel sounds, especially the sounds /æ/ (-ah), /e/ (-eh), and /eɪ/ (-ay). I think that this activity is suitable for English language learners at the beginner level because this activity involves differentiating between vowel sounds that are often confused.

When I was looking for resources that I could use for this activity, I came across a concept called "minimal pairs." Minimal pairs are words the the same syllables except for a single sound. This gave me the idea to find words that share consonant sounds but have different vowel sounds that also match the sounds that the speaker has difficulty distinguishing between. I found one video on YouTube that lists several activities that can be used in an ESL classroom to teach this concept and help ELLs distinguish between sounds. The video can be found here. However, the example given in the video is used for consonants, so I have modified it to use the vowel sounds that I listed above.

I have created three charts that all include two of the three vowel sounds. Each chart includes 10 words for both vowel sounds that are divided into column A and B and share consonant sounds with the words across from them. For this activity, the teacher is to divide the class into groups of two. The teacher then instructs students to choose and pronounce one word from each of the word pairs and have their partner say whether the word stated was from column A or B. The teacher can explain this activity by going through the first chart as an example and have the class give an answer for each pair. After, both partners in the class groupings can do one chart where they are the speaker and another where they are the listener.

I chose this activity because it seems relatively simple and because I recognize that pronunciation itself can be rooted in not being able to hear the differences between sounds. As such, this activity addresses both the pronunciation and listening aspects of the problem.

I have included a template in the attachment for this post.