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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03
My name at the airport
Ages Any
Level Beginner–Elementary
Time 5–10 minutes
Focus Pronunciation, sound-letter correspondences in English
Functions Warm-up, closer
This activity personalizes work on differences between the sound systems of English and the mother tongue.
Procedure
- Ask if anyone has every heard their name paged at an airport.
- Ask what can happen if your name is paged and you don't hear it or recognize it.
- Ask students to think how their name might be pronounced by an announcer at an airport in an English speaking country.
- One by one, ask each student to mimic their name as it might be spoken by an English announcer. Help out as appropriate.
- Call on a few individuals and ask them to page a classmate who is the other side of the room. (Only choose pairs who you know like each other.)
Following on Ask students what systematic differences they notice between English and mother tongue pronunciation.
Comment
- At beginner level, some use of the mother tongue may be required.
- Our own names are not just any random words. We are especially likely to notice and remember how they change when they are pronounced in a different language. For beginners and elementary learners knowledge about this can be a useful aid-to-memory about significant features of the sound system of the target language. To a lesser extent, much the same is probably also true of the names of friends/classmates.
Seth Lindstromberg
