Teaching the TRAP vowel to speakers with a German-language background

One of the most consistent pronunciation problems that speakers with a German-language background (and also many other backgrounds) have is that they replace the vowel /ae/ in words like bad, hand, black etc. by the closest counterpart from their own language (in the case of German /ɛ/). Since /ɛ/ is also part of the English phoneme inventory (cf. homophonous word pairs like English bet and German Bett ‘bed’), this substitution leads to a merger of phonemes in the target language. In this paper, we will first investigate the significance of this merger for foreign language teaching. We will then turn to a linguistic description of the vowel before, finally, looking at a number of teaching strat-egies for this problem.