In my adult classroom I often have ELL students whose native language is Spanish. Many are working parents who need to quickly assimilate into the English speaking culture. My first exercise for minimal pairs would stress the different vowel sounds in English as it is difficult for native speakers of Spanish. This is primarily because in Spanish the vowels are always and consistently pronounced the same way. As we know, this is far from the case with English!
I would have cards made up for the students so that each student could take a set home to practice outside school. For the classroom activity we shuffle the cards and pass them out among the students. For 5 to 10 minutes each student will look at the card and pick a classmate to pronounce the pairs out loud, then repeat by listening to the classmate. If I wanted to add an additional challenge, one classmate could read the minimal pairs and another student stand at the board and write what they hear. It might be interesting to see if they can understand each other.
The words in my first list might include the following minimal pairs:
| and/end |
| bet/bait |
| bet/bat |
| bit/beet |
| bought/bet |
| cart/caught |
| cat/cart |
| cat/cut |
| caught/coat |
| caught/cot |
| coat/cot |
| hour/are |
| itch/etch |
| kettle/cattle |
| mat/met |
| set/sat |
| sheep/ship |
| sit/set |
| tail/tell |
| tail/tile |
| ten/teen |
| tile/toil |
| tin/ten |
Following the exercise I could have a bottom-up method illustrated reading exercise incorporating the words to be read aloud in class.
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