Air Traffic Control

This activity is a free sample from PronPack 3: Pronunciation Pairworks. A minimal pair is a pair of words or phrases with identical pronunciation except for one phoneme. For example, bean and bin are identical except for the vowel sound, which is /i:/ for bean and /ɪ/ for bin. If such a sound difference does not exist in the student's L1, they are likely to find it problematic both for understanding and for being understood. This game from PronPack 3, is similar to the well-known game 'Battleships' in that locations on a map are shown by horizontal and vertical coordinates, but in this case, the coordinates are also minimal pairs. You can download the teacher's notes and students worksheet below. I've also included a North America and an Asia version of the map, for those students who are not interested in Europe!

See more information about PronPack at pronpack.com.

See also "Pronunciation Problems" for another activity to work on the bean-bin distinction.