Minimal pairs? Minimal difficulty! Vowel perception in young learners

Abstract

Most teachers are familiar with the rule “the earlier, the better” and that it is much easier to teach proper pronunciation from the very beginning than to correct fossilized pronunciation errors at later stages (e.g. Baker 1996; Nixon and Tomlinson 2005). While young children are able to acquire L2 phonetics by listening to stories, songs etc., teenagers who are about 13 years old are much more conscious learners (Nixon and Tomlinson 2005) and may start learning pronunciation just like they study L2 grammar or vocabulary.

Since it is often said that perception precedes production, the aim of this paper is to present some teaching methods aimed at training young learners of English in vowel perception. It also reports the results from classes in which these methods were used, which prove that young teenagers can easily learn to discriminate vowel pairs and thus also improve their listening skills.