tractor wrote:Doing these minimal pair exercises, are they only listening? Or are they also speaking out loud? Have they been explained why they are doing these exercises? Are they doing any other activities or exercises in order to learn proper pronunciation?
I believe the study was fairly standard in its use of minimal pairs, in that students listened to the isolated words spoken and picked the correct answer from a choice of two on a preprinted list
eg
1. ship sheep
2. lack rack
3. pen pin
etc.
The test subjects were on a full time study course in English language and so had lots of additional learning tasks to do.
I don't know what they were told specifically, but it came from teachers and they were likely to be assumed as a positive influence.
My memory of what I read is flaky (for previously discussed reasons), but I have a feeling that minimal pairs originated as a way of
testing language ability rather than
developing it.
Then I suspect the whole teach-to-test kicked in, because if you are going to grade someone on something, you're going to make damned sure they can get as good a grade as possible.
In fact, thinking about it, that may well have been the point of the paper -- if minimal pair training means higher results in minimal pair but doesn't translate to better language skills outside of the minimal pairs tests, not only should you not do minimal pair
training, you shouldn't do graded minimal pairs
testing either because (a) it arguably isn't a good measure of skill and (b) even if it is a good measure (which I suspect it actually is) it results in teach-to-test, which means learning to identify minimal pairs while concentrating on them.