Korean Job Discussion Forums

[MollyBloom]

I was wondering if anyone ever incorporated any Old English into their lessons.

I am working with my students on phonology because their pronunciation is horrible. I am thinking of doing some fun activities using the IPA chart. They are bright kids that have studied abroad, many of them even multi-lingual (besides English and Korean).

I obviously don't want to introduce any ancient language if they can't use the modern one properly, but teaching them Old English is not my goal.

I know exercises can be used in grammar/sentence structure lessons where in which words that make no sense are used in a sentence just to teach identifying parts of speech:

"The quarks quibbled quinly, and banly baled the yar."

The voiced and unvoiced "th" is definitely a problem (as I saw with the French I taught), and that dipthong, "eth" is also seen in Old English. Many sounds from OE are the same modern sounds used nowadays. I was wondering if I could kind of do the same thing as the aforementioned "quarks" sentence, but using OE.

I know it would be challenging, but is it appropriate? Comments?

[SPINOZA]

Anything that interests your students is good in my book.

If I thought pre-Norman English would interest my adults, I'd do it. I don't think it would though in my case.

Anglo-Saxon and Norman synonyms is a good thing to do, however. They are rarely totally synonymous, so the different shades of meaning generate some thought and discussion. It's good.

[MollyBloom]

Thanks a lot! I am thinking about it. I recently translated Beowulf for grad school, so that is in my memory. I was thinking of using that because reading it aloud might sound really funny to them and might make it fun.

Wouldn't you laugh if you were a foreign student and heard:

Hw�t! We Gardena in geardagum,
�eodcyninga, �rym gefrunon,
hu �a ��elingas ellen fremedon.

I would. But then again, I am one of the weird people in the world that likes Beowulf.

[confuzed]

[MollyBloom]

Nah...I got it good at my work. One of the reasons why my director hired me was to teach an 8th grade lit class, and it's awesome. The school lets me, and all the teachers, do what they want.

[Hotpants]

How about some poetry? Anything from Shakespeare to 19th century poetry has a lot of archaic terms in them, and I think students will appreciate it if they can be made to recognize some of the intense creativity found in some of these writings. I once did a lesson like this and explained words like 'thou' and 'thee' and pointed out how it's also common to see these forms in many biblical contexts - songs, prayers, bibles, for example.

What about the witches spell at the beginning of Macbeth? There are lots of extension activities that you could do with that.

[mithridates]

[confuzed]

[ilovebdt]

If you were thinking about Shakespeare, there are books you can get which have the original Shakespeare on one side and a modern English translation on the other.

I will try and find the publisher if you are interested.

ilovebdt

[novimber]

Last semester I took a TESOL Methodologies class here in the States. The class was about 2/3 Korean exchange students and 1/3 Americans, and I think we were studying reading and teaching reading through extensive reading and context and stuff, and my teacher used the Jabberwocky poem by Louis Carroll, which isn't Old English of course but has a lot of nonsense words. But what he did was, he told all the Americans, speaking too quickly for the Koreans to understand, to pretend not to know the words were nonsense, and then put us in groups and got us to guess the meanings of the nonsense words. The point I guess was to teach us how students can learn vocabulary from reading things in context. So... now that I'm writing this, I'm not quite sure what my point was, but I wonder if you could adapt this poem or this strategy to an actualy ESL class

[Samantha]

Jabberwocky is also used to teach students (native speakers and English learners) how to decode the words function based on how it's used in context.

I used the lesson with my advanced 8th grade English class here in the States. I did a review of all the parts of speech and then gave them the poem and asked them to decode all the nonsense words based on how it was functioning and the descriptions given of all the parts of speech. The kids loved it. I can dig up the lesson plan if anyone wants it to use with their students.

The same idea could be done with most of the Shakespeare poems/sonnets and even a semi-modern translation of things like Beowulf.

[Woland]

I guess someone has to say that this is bad idea, and that will have to be me. The problem with using Old English is that it's not intelligible to the students. When learners approach texts, their first focus is on meaning. When they can't get meaning out of texts, it is frustrating and makes it difficult for them to move on to aspects of form, like pronunciation, that we want them to learn. Giving them texts from which they can extract meaning and then moving their attention to form is simply more effective.

You can do things that are silly, like tongue twisters, to practice particular sounds, but the meaning, though humorous, should still be accessible. Just parroting sounds with no real meaning associated with them won't help students with their pronunciation.

If you're really interested in teaching pronunciation effectively, you may want to invest in the following book, which is the best reference available for teachers at the moment:

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (1996). Teaching pronunciation: A reference book for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

It should be easily usable by you since you seem to already have some linguistics background.

But I do really think that instructional material should be meaningful for students.

[MollyBloom]

Update:

I did Beowulf with some upper-level classes, and they loved it! Some of them even came to class the next week and memorized the first couple of lines! One student drew his rendition of Beowulf killing Grendel!

Next I'll move on to the Venerable Bede...kidding.