Distinctive input

A word for microwave = popty ping in Welsh  Image: pixabay

Happy New Year, dear reader.

For my first post of the new decade I'm going to have a look at the importance of making language input distinctive. As Gianfranco and I are researching and writing our next book about cognitive science for language teachers, we have been examining memory and what helps students remember language.

An emphasis is often placed on spaced repetition, which is obviously vitally important, but less stress has been laid on how important it is that language items be distinctive - interesting, outstanding, funny, memorable for whatever reason. Teachers can do a good deal to help make language memorable, through anecdotes, pictures, anecdotes, gestures, mimes and more no doubt. With that in mind, I asked language teachers on Facebook and Twitter to give me examples of words or phrases they recalled with just one memorable exposure and no repetition.

 Teacher Barri Moc made this useful general point:

"For me I have retained certain chunks from various languages I do no use often and can recall these instantly when needed. It was usually based on need or desire to express something in in that language. Munguawabariki rafiki yangu is one in Swahili meaning God bless you friend."

So here are some of the examples they came up with, some of them amusing. They are a reminder that we as teachers we can sometimes just come up with original ways of helping students remember language.


Naughty associations

"Piscine - “PISS IN” the pool."

"Dick in German for obvious reasons along with Vater ... Koch, Kochin... Fuchs .. phoque in French etc."

"The Russian word шапка was instantly memorable to my Russian class once we saw it written down."

"Talking about the weather in German: meant to say that it was schwül but said schwul instead." Schwul means gay.  Ah, the importance of phonemic distinctions!

"Our French assistant went to the butchers in the 80s and asked if he had a big cock! Coq au vin has never been the same....."

"I learned that you can't say ich bin heiss to a kitchen full of Germans in my hall of residence on my year abroad. Eventually once the merriment had died down, someone explained my error." (Two meanings of hot there. Works for French too.

Teacher demo 

Mein Bein tut weh. I'll never forget my year 8 German teacher hobbling around the classroom crying out that her leg hurt. The hilarity embedded the vocab.
 
"My legend of a German teacher taught us so many words and phrases using wordplay:
If you run out of mustard, you SENFor the waiter!" (I like that one!) 


"Chausson pomme. Who doesn't want apple in their slippers? At school, the link between lundi, Monday, la lune, lunatics and the lunar landings and then lunettes. I thought this was miraculous and it still thrills me to offer it to children and see which eyes light up."

"I’ll never forget ‘coup état’ because our Spanish teacher dictated her notes to us on the Mexican Revolution and we wrote ‘acute attack’. Now I make sure my students understand exactly what I’m talking about and always recount this story."

"Conejo - my Spanish teacher told us to think of a rabbit reading the Echo, our local Liverpool paper. I still do."

"Demonstration of when to use which case with dual case prepositions in German with actions to show movement by my very memorable first year undergrad lecturer. Included him physically laying down on a desk and climbing on a chair. Unforgettable and you have to admire the lengths he went to to illustrate a grammar point!"  
"Tuna in Spanish is atún and my teacher told me that the fish sneezed which pushed the a to the front of the word in Spanish. Really weird but always stuck with me!"

Personal experience

"I arrived at Lyon airport for my year abroad and a bloke asked me d'où venez-vous? I had to think for a while to answer this short, precise question, felt like an idiot, but will never forget it, and the tu form, try to teach my pupils that question now d'où viens-tu?"

"Clignoter. On the phone with French tech support trying to get my router to work. "La petite lumière n'est pas allumée, puis elle s'allume. Plusieurs fois. L'internet ne fonctionne pas." "Ah bon, ça clignote?"

"Ce citești in Romanian as c /tsh/ and ș /sh/ were quite difficult to pronounce so close together. It means what do you read? and was taken from a dialogue in the Assimil method I used back then."

"Stingy" from a Friends episode. It came up in my translation class at uni the following week, I was so chuffed to know it!"

 "Many years ago in Berlin, when negotiating a renewal of a contract on behalf of the company I was working for, I offered the client some rhubarb Rhabarber when I wanted to offer discounts Rabatte on the courses we were offering. That’s how I learned rhubarb in German."

"Handschuh (glove) just cos the thought of wearing shoes on my hands made me laugh."

"My host mother in Spain asked me something about bragas, a word I'd never heard before. I didn't have the circumlocution skills at the time to figure it out, and she ended up waving my own underwear in my face."

"Tubo de escape.... in Spain with a friend talking about what he needed to fix on his car, I'd no experience with car parts in Spanish but instantly knew he was talking about an exhaust pipe."

 "My German friend talked about their first ever visit to panto and used the word zotig, which means smutty. It stuck immediately because it was in the context of a good laugh." 

"Si è fatto male? Learnt immediately from watching a very poignant scene in La vita è bella."

"Offenlochverschliessmachine! (Lit: the open hole closing machine) during a visit to a former industrial park in Duisberg Germany in 2001 - stuck with me ever since!"

"Quincaillerie is my favourite French word. The small village in Languedoc where my pen friends family came from and where I spent two summers in my teens had a fascinating one. No idea why - it just appeals to me and so does the environment!" (It means a hardware store or ironmonger's.)

"Transom - learned it in an old-school dorm room of a liberal arts college, lying in bed, gazing at the window above the door, being ridiculously giddy, falling in love." (It means a beam.)

False cognates

"Then there was the time that my friend asked the Argentine woman if "this was today's bread". I chuckled...I had never asked such a thing at US grocery stores. I explained that we throw in so many preservativos.. my friend looked at me puzzled." Same problem in French. I bet you know a few more.

Mnemonics

"Sexi date. The endings in French for 1st and 3rd person present tense verbs -
finiS. IR verbs/RE verbs. JouE. ER verbs. PeuX/veuX and aI. Avoir. SEXI is the word used to remember present tense verbs for first person. DATE is the same for third person. Stops students from putting s with 3rd person and t with 1st and so on."

Various French perfect tense être verb mnemonics, including MRS DAVENTRAMP.

Miscellaneous associations

"Avoir la bougeotte was mine - lovely phrase and in Russian my word is сногсшибательный the first one struck me as means wanderlust and the second one was when Winnie the Pooh was describing his day." 

"Kakerlake in German just because I liked the sound." It means cockroach.

A case of onomatopoeia: "Popty ping - microwave in Welsh." Nice!

"The word amanecer in Spanish because it is from a song and the image of a sunrise is really beautiful in it. And écureuil (squirrel) in French because I just love the sound of the word!"

"Libertad....freedom, referencing the Statue of Liberty."

"How about tripatouiller, which I learnt from a French native speaker in a y7 class when I asked her to write me a paragraph about her family. Looked it up once, and it stuck. Such a nice-sounding word." (It means to fiddle with.0

Have a happy and healthy year. May your input be distinctive!