Article | Published in The TES on 7th December 2012 | By: Catherine Paver - Modern Foreign Languages - Resources
What it's all about
"Could I have a large slice of cat, please?"
Mistakes are comedy gold. Take time over them and you can have a laugh while learning a lot about languages, writes Catherine Paver.
Tell pupils about the howlers you made when you were learning a language. In the above example, I did not know the Italian for "cake", so said the French word "gateau" with an Italian accent.
But "gatto" means "cat". The waiter kept a straight face until I asked if the "chocolate cat had nuts in it". This taught me to look things up. Let pupils keep a page in their books where they note down their favourite mistakes: the funny ones that taught them the most.
Perhaps you misheard a word and did not check its spelling. One teacher told his class about a big hose used to extinguish large borrega fires instead of bodega. The children wondered why he had to extinguish sheep. Beware of nouns related to each other: caballero and caballo are similar, so be sure which one means "gentleman".
Don't do what one pupil did and say, "You're a real horse!" Tell pupils about words in different languages that look or sound similar but have very different meanings. "Preservative" in English comes from the Latin praeservativus, which developed rather a different meaning in 18 other languages.
In French, German and Spanish, you might ask: "Does this jam contain condoms?"
What else?
Jen Turner's French reading and listening vocabulary list helps pupils to tackle "false friends", bit.ly/FrenchFalseFriends. Stop meaning from being lost in translation with anyholland 's list of French-English faux amis, bit.ly/FauxAmis.
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