296 Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?
Following this, begin another similar task. This time ask students to find
out which words from their language have been adopted into English. Make
another poster with these international words and discuss:
✓ Have the words kept their meaning or have they changed?
✓ Does the use of these words abroad create a good image of your country?
✓ How do foreigners pronounce them?
Finally have an international word quiz. Get the students to guess the origin
of international words used in English. For example:
✓ Alcohol (Arabic)
✓ Amateur (French)
✓ Boomerang (Aboriginal)
✓ Bungalow (Bengali)
✓ Hamburger (German)
✓ Ketchup (Chinese)
✓ Taboo (Hawaiian)
Spelling out abbreviations
In this age of text messaging, youngsters are very adept at finding short
ways of writing down what they want to say. Why not use some well-known
abbreviations to get them thinking? They may already know the gist of some,
but not letter for letter and others they may have to investigate.
For instance, these abbreviations from broadcasting, texting and the world at
large would make a great quiz activity:
✓ AKA: Also known as
✓ ASAP: As soon as possible
✓ BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
✓ CD: Compact disk
