Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 6; November 02

Working with Loan Words

Type of class: Monolingual

Teacher: limited knowledge of the students' MT.

Level: elementary to advanced

Purpose: to make students aware of the borrowings by English from their mother tongue and their mother tongue's borrowings from English.

• Offer the students a list of words borrowed from English by their mother tongue. This list should give the original English word and its new form in the students' mother tongue. The two parallel lists should be out of order with each other. ( see example below)

  Give them a second list of words their MT has loaned to English.

• Ask the students to work on the first lists and match up the words in the two parallel columns.
• Get them to chorus-read the matched words, whispering the MT words and singing the English ones.
• Get them to pick out the words where the MT version has a different meaning from the original English word.
• Now ask them to work on the words borrowed from their mother tongue into English. Ask them to work alone and organise these words into categories and give each category a heading.
  Some students then read their categories to the class and explain why they have categorised this way.

Example lists ( in this case the MT used is Japanese )

Words borrowed from English by Japanese

		key:
1.ball	a. konpyuta	1.c
2. milk	b.miruku	2.b
3.computer	c. bohru	3.a
4. television	d. biru	4.e
5 building	e. terebi	5.d
6.steering wheel:	f. super	6.g
7.supermarket	g. handle	7.f
8 contact	h. posuto	8.i
9. leader	i. kontakuto	9.j
10. post	j. lihda	10.h

Words borrowed from Japanese by English:
aikido, haiku, noh, sushi, geisha, tatami, futon, banzai, bonzai, kimono, samurai, origami, mikado, ikebana, shogun, harakiri

Acknowledgement: the idea for this lesson came from an article by Yamauchi Kazuaki and Stephen Lambacher in The Language Teacher, August 2000: Using English loan words to teach English Pronunciation to Japanese.