I just returned from the annual Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference in Montreal last night. It was fulfilling as always. I met new faces, caught up with old ones, and most importantly, continued to learn from the researchers trying to better understand what is important for learning a second language (not just English) and how to best teach these methods to others.

In your personal research about accent reduction, you will likely come across the term “manner.” This is an important term and I wanted to take the time to explain what it means and how it plays a role in your accent.

The definition listed in my glossary is: “Air flow through the vocal tract when producing a sound (e.g. stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, glide, liquid).” But to be more straightforward, manner describes what the parts of your mouth and throat are doing as you say each sound.

A minimal pair is a set of two words that differ by only one sound or one tone. An example of a minimal pair in General American English (GAE) is “law, raw.” Another is “fee, feet.” Minimal pairs are an important tool and are frequently used in accent reduction sessions both for assessment and for treatment. When we initially evaluate our clients, we first want to know if they can hear the difference between two consonant sounds or two vowel sounds. Very often, speakers of other languages cannot distinguish differences in English sounds or sound patterns that do not exist in their native languages.

In sessions with new clients, many will be very surprised when I point out the slight differences between their productions and what they are trying to say. One client said to me, “I had no idea people were hearing, ‘I scraped my niece’ instead of ‘I scraped my knees.’” Can you hear how the first word is pronounced with an “s” and the second is pronounced with a “z” at the end? Another client told me about how he confused his team when he said, 'the other company was light in their thought process’ instead of being ‘right in their thought process,' substituting an “l” for an “r.”

If a client cannot discriminate between two sounds, it will be difficult for him or her to produce both sounds accurately. For this reason, in the initial training of sound production, we work on auditory perception. We use words in contrast to make explicit the difference for each of the consonants and vowels used in GAE.

Can you think of examples of minimal pairs in your native language? What about in English?

​Hello, friends. I am sorry I neglected you for nearly a month. As you know, I spent a good part of August on vacation. I was visiting my parents in Colorado. My husband and I met up with my former exchange student and her family from Belgium. We had a wonderful time, sharing old stories, talking about how crazy our prospective governments are at the moment, playing at the pool together, going to Red Rocks and seeing dinosaur fossils.