Editing Minimal pair (section)

==Teaching==
Minimal pairs were an important part of the theory of pronunciation teaching during its development in the period of [[structuralist linguistics]], particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, and minimal pair drills were widely used to train students to discriminate among the phonemes of the target language.<ref>{{cite book|last=Celce-Murcia|year=1996|pages=3–4|title=Teaching Pronunciation|display-authors=etal}}</ref>  These drills took the form of minimal pair word drills and minimal pair sentence drills. For example, if the focus of a lesson was on the distinction /ɪ/ versus /ɛ/, learners might be asked to signal which sound they heard as the teacher pronounced lists of words with these phonemes such as ''lid/led'', ''tin/ten'', or ''slipped/slept''. Minimal pair sentence drills consisted of paired sentences such as "He slipped on the floor/He slept on the floor." Again, learners would be asked to distinguish which of the sentences they heard as the teacher read them aloud. Another use of minimal pair drills was in pair work. Here, one member of the pair would be responsible for listening to the other member read the minimal pair word or sentence aloud and would be tasked with identifying which phoneme was being produced. In this form of classroom practice, both the skills of perception and production were practiced. Later writers have criticized the approach as being artificial and lacking in relevance to language learners' needs.<ref>{{cite book|last=Brown|first=Gillian|year=1990|pages=144–6|title=Listening to Spoken English}}</ref> However, even today minimal pair listening and production drills remain a common tool for the teaching of segmental differences.

Some writers have claimed that learners are likely not to hear differences between phones if the difference is not a phonemic one.<ref>{{cite book|last=Lado|first=R.|year=1961|pages=15|title=Language Testing}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Pennington|first=M.|year=1996|pages=24|title=Phonology in English Language Teaching}}</ref> One of the objectives of [[contrastive analysis]]<ref>{{cite book|last=Lado|first=R.|year=1957|title=Linguistics across Cultures}}</ref> of languages' sound systems was to identify points of likely difficulty for language learners that would arise from differences in phoneme inventories between the native language and the target language. However, experimental evidence for this claim is hard to find, and the claim should be treated with caution.<ref>{{cite book|last=Celce-Murcia|year=1996|pages=19–20|title=Teaching Pronunciation|display-authors=etal}}</ref>