Minimal pairs in the context of teaching English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

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  • 日本の共通語としての英語教育における ミニマルペアについて

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In a world where English is a dominant communication medium, the need to sound like a native speaker is diminishing. Accents are unique tokens of every speaker’s expression, and they should be embraced as such. However, situations where a conveyed message is misunderstood are not uncommon, especially when English is used as a lingua franca. They often occur when a phoneme typical for English has either a significantly different quality or is completely absent in the speaker’s native language. This article discusses a series of activities using minimal pairs―two words varying by a sound typically difficult to distinguish. The tasks have been formulated based on isolating such challenging phonemes observed during daily interactions with Japanese speakers of English. They aim to enhance students’ ability to distinguish these sounds as speakers, as well as listeners.

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