Lesson Two

This lesson is designed to help students become familiar with basic phonetic alphabets (vowels and consonants) and some common segmental errors that may occur in English pronunciation, and IPA notation. The focus of this lesson is to equip students with the essential knowledge and terminology that they will need in the remainder of the course and teach students how to improve their pronunciation problems with the help of speech corpora. Throughout the course, students will be analyzing corpora data and identifying the pronunciation issues occurring in the recordings to increase their awareness of their own pronunciation problems. Exercises like minimal pair activity would help students consolidate their learning.

The reasons for the use of minimal pair activities in this lesson are twofold: 1. to raise students' awareness of the subtle distinctions between vowel pairs, and 2. to give them the tools to analyze and improve their own pronunciation. This is an important introductory lesson that will lay the foundation for later corpus-based activities. After completing this lesson, students will have a clear awareness of common pronunciation issues, will know how identify vowel pronunciation features and analyze them for accuracy, and will be able to read IPA vowel notation. Therefore, to better facilitate students in digesting the contents of this corpus-based English pronunciation course, this lesson will be incorporated in the introductory part of the course.