Odd One Out

do you ever find yourself drowning in a sea of exam papers marking practice exam after practice exam? I do. What's most upsetting, as I've said a great number of times before, is the fact that speaking practice in class has now drifted so far away from teaching English and deep into the rhelms of teaching exam technique.
One thing that is too often forgotten is pronunciation. Which itself is a huge part of speaking exams. Every nationality has its own little quirks when pronouncing English. Here in Spain there are a great number of them. I'll go into more detail in future posts about specific Spanish problems. With the help and input of the deeply knowledgeable font of information that is the great www.watersdw30.wordpress.com 
Today, however, I'm going to start with a universal activity that a colleage of mine, Beth Smith, introduced me to last week. It´s a great warmer or cooler and really helps students differentiate between different sounds. It's similar to the minimal pairs activity below but with a slightly more advanced twist.

As always with my classes I put students into pairs or groups and get them to read aloud the word groups below, one at a time. Students have to decide which word is the odd one out.
simple, effective and fun.

If you want more ideas or you want to tell me what I'm doing wrong. You can follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb

Until the next time.