Teaching English Discrete Sounds through Minimal Pairs

Minimal pairs bear great benefits in pronunciation teaching and learning which have long been of fruitful use.However, the full use of these pairs has not yet been made in the setting of Hung Vuong University.This paper sought to examine possible problems facing English non-majored students at Hung Vuong University in recognizing and producing English discrete sounds as well as in what way and to what extent do minimal pairs facilitate the teaching and learning of English discrete sounds.The data were collected both quantitatively and qualitatively from various sources: questionnaires for and interviews with both the teacher and student subjects, tests of students' sound recognitions, regular real-time observations, audio recordings of students' sound productions, and spectrogram-based analyses of these recordings.The findings revealed that virtually all of the student subjects face the six pronunciation problems: omitting the word-final consonant, adding the word-final /s/ to English words not ending in /s/, adding the schwa /6/ in the middle of a consonant cluster, mispronouncing strange sounds to Vietnamese people, e.g./t/ and /d/, failing to differentiate between long and short vowels, and failing to differentiate between voiced and voiceless consonants.Both the student and the teacher subjects also show high appreciation of the pedagogical effectiveness of minimal pairs when employed either as a teaching or learning tool within the extent to which English discrete sounds are concerned. Index Terms-discrete sounds, minimal pairs, teaching pronunciation1 Minimal pairs are -pairs of words that differ in meaning on the basic of a change in only one sound.‖(Avery and Ehrlich, 1992: 39) 2 In the scope of this study, discrete sounds are vowels and consonants articulated separately.3 -a DRILL in which MINIMAL PAIRS are practiced together, especially in order to help students to learn to distinguish a sound contrast‖ (Richards et al., 1993: 231) 4 A phoneme is -the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words.‖(Richards, Platt and Weber, 1987: 214)