Designing a Study to Measure the Effects of Computer-based Minimal Pair Identification Training on L2 Aural Word Recognition and Listening Comprehension

This article describes the research design of a study to measure the effect that minimal pair identification training has on listening comprehension and the ability to recognize spoken words. An extensive literature review and theoretical background for the study are also provided. The study hopes to determine whether English learners, who practiced identifying aurally presented minimal pairs for five weeks, will improve their general listening comprehension ability and their ability to recognize aurally presented words as compared to a control group. If a causal relationship between demonstrated between these variables, there may be pedagogical implications for more focus on bottom-up skills such as phoneme identification to enhance general listening comprehension.