White Western teacher showing his class the phonemic chart

Sound discrimination

This is an activity to help students differentiate and produce the short / I / sound as in 'milk’ and the longer / i: / sound as in 'beef’, although it can be adapted to any pair of sounds which your students have differentiation problems with.

My students often claim that they can’t hear the difference.

Procedure

To help students hear the difference I explain that I am going to say a word with the / I / sound several times then change to a word with the / i: / sound. The students should raise their hands when they hear the word change. I then say "ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, sheep, sheep,…". This procedure can be repeated with other words ("hit"/"heat", "it"/"eat" etc.)
To help students differentiate these sounds in the context of longer utterances, I then do the same with a sentence: "I saw a big ship, I saw a big ship, I saw a big ship, I saw a big ship, I saw a big sheep, I saw a big sheep…" until the students can hear the change.
I then write, in phonemic script, the words 'Steve’ and 'Jill’ on the board above a picture of a man and woman. I ask the students "Who is this?" When it has been established that the two characters are Steve and Jill I ask "Who is Jill’s partner?" (and point to the / I / sound). An acceptable answer would be 'Chris’, 'Phil’, 'Kim’, 'Tim’, 'Jim’ or any other name containing the / I / sound. If you want to make it easier, you could ask "Who’s her partner, Chris or Pete?" Students should understand the idea of this game quite quickly.
I then ask "What’s Jill’s favourite food / drink?" Answers could be 'milk’, 'fish’, 'chips’, 'gin’ etc. I write this information on the board and continue asking questions about Jill and Steve until there are two columns with information about Jill and Steve’s lives (where they live, favourite colours, animals etc.)
I then drill sentences such as "Jill likes fish and chips", "Jill likes Brad Pitt" or "Steve lives with Pete Reid".
In subsequent lessons, when a student makes a / I /or / i: / pronunciation error such as saying 'deeficult’ instead of 'difficult’, I write the word 'difficult’ on the board and ask "Is this a Steve word or a Jill word?". Students can answer then be asked to pronounce the word correctly.

Thank you..it is helpful

It is an interactive and insightful way of teaching pronunciation. I really want to try it. Thank you.

Thanks Nann-Mya-Aye,

Let us know how you get on with this technique!

Cath

TeachingEnglish team

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Hi Sana.Sajjad

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Thanks,

Cath

TeachingEnglish team

I think the activities mentioned here will be very helpful to my class.

Very heplful.

Thanks a lot.

Easy and clear.

Nice technique, I will apply it. Thank you for sharing.

So helpful

Thank you

This is interesting. Thanks

Thank you, a clear example will be very helpful.

it is truly useful，thank you!

This activity requires the students to be attentive, thereby getting the students to differentiate between the short and long vowel sounds and helps them to learn with fun. In an overcrowded classroom, the teacher needs to be loud and clear enough as there will be interruptions time to time. Other than raising hands, the students can be requested to do some other actions based on the vowel sound to make this activity more interesting while increasing their active participation.

I will perform it during teaching

Having difficult to differentiate these two sounds is very common for Brazilian students. They usually say 'f/i:/sh' instead of 'f/I/sh' and loads of other words with this short sound /I/. Thanks for this activity!

This is a quite interesting technique to use in the classroom. Could you please give advice for large-sized classroom?

Hi Brownie2003

Thanks for your comment. With a larger class, I think you could still use this technique. Asking learners to put up their hands when they hear a change in sound would still work well with a large class. Learners could answer the questions about Jill and Steve (and write their answers down) in small groups and then you could check at the end. You would still make sure all learners had a table at the end with a list of words with the different sounds, which will help them distinguish the long and short vowel sounds - that’s basically the idea here.

If you try this with a large class, please let us know how you get on!

Cath

TeachingEnglish team

It is an excellent method of technique for teaching pronunciation.The students will definitely benefit from these.Thank you for sharing.

Very nice method for teaching sound discrimination..Thank you, I will try in my lesson.

Thank you for sharing. Definitely a great method and I'm going to use it in some pronunciation lessons.

I will definitely try this technique with my students.

I will try it with my pupils.

It is really beneficial to teach students to hear the difference

This is sound interesting how to introduce the correct pronunciation to the learners. I will try to use this in the classroom

The way of transitioning between the sounds is so thought provoking. That I loved it how it's going to help my students.

it is truly useful

thank you...helpful indeed

Excellent concept. Many Argentinian pupils struggle to distinguish between the short / I / sound and the longer /:i/ sound. This activity will be helpful for them.

Great idea. For many Brazilian students it is quite difficult to differentiate the short / I / sound and the longer /:i/ sound. This activity will help them. Thanks for sharing.

Loved it! Thank you.

Learning made easy and fun

Great ideas

This is an excellent technique to introduce pupils to the concepts of sound discrimination and phonetic symbol recognition. They will be able to hone their ear as well as their tonged position in response to various sounds.

Nice activities

great, I will try this one

Drilling of word pronunciation is very good, especially for beginners.
This a good example repeating like this ("hit"/"heat", "it"/"eat" etc.)

What a great ideas are here, I´m going to use it with my students.

I like how easy it is to understand and how simple it is structured. Teachers can use these detailed explanations to make their lessons more involving and easy when it comes to sound identification.

Great ideas and new methods to explain the difference in a simple way.
Thanks

A very good way of teaching pronunciation! I like it! Thank so much for your unreserved services.

My students will love this method and grasp the difference faster.

This is very simplified for students. The example used has been very helpful

This is an excellent way of teaching pronunciation to learners.

That is a great job. Also one of the ways to discriminate voiced and voiceless sounds is by touching the glottis .

This is an interesting way of teaching sound discrimination. Thanks

That is an amazing way that is precise and simple, and it can help my students know the differences quickly in pronounciation

It can be combined with teaching intonation

Amazing technique to diffrenciate between long towels and short vowels in the sound and how about to say a word and let them think about different to words with the same sound