One of the toughest things about having discussion class is choosing topics appropriate for both level of language ability and level of interest or knowledge.
It is pretty difficult to discuss topics students have no ideas about or no vocabulary to use to discuss.
So in my search for new topics for a class I have been teaching now for several years, I came upon made up words.
I found this to be a pretty interesting activity, and I hope that others might as well.
I created lists of made up words using an online generator. Then, as usual for this class, I divided them into groups of 3 or 4 students.
I gave each group the same list of 5 of the made up words. For example list one consisted of:
Chershoee
Hoppler
SWerradith
Novaly
Wetwest
I then asked the groups to decide what the meaning of each of the words might be and to explain why they thought their meaning was appropriate. I told them there was actually no wrong answer though there would be answers that were better than others and they would have to share their answers with the class. This often is important to keep them focused and working since they know they will be expected to talk to the group and listen and respond to the other groups.
I think that it is key to have a reason for their meanings to avoid arbitrary assignment of meaning (yes, this could easily happen and has happened to me on occassion!)
Then I gave them a few minutes to discuss their words, their meanings. They were allowed to use their dictionaries to find the meanings of words that had similar sounds to pieces of the words or to help with their explanations.
I had each group share their word, its pronunciation, and the reason for their meaning. We did this one word at a time rather than going down the entire list.
Overall, I thought the exercise went fairly well. The students seemed to enjoy it as well.
Here are a couple of their definitions:
Chershoee
– a kind of cheese shaped like a shoe
– a kind of meat dish (it sounds a little like the name of a pork dish in Japanese)
– doing “cheers!” with shoes
Hoppler
– a person who makes apples hot
– the children of hopping people
– a hopping helicopter
Werradith
– a small dinosaur
– a contraction for “we are radish”
Novaly
– a brand name of a sister company to Burberry
– a valuable star
– only one
One of the words from another list was “glaretram” which resulted in one group deciding it meant “glamorous ram”. They even provided a sketch:
“glaretram- glamorous ram”
I will surely try this again, but I also would like to have them invent some words of their own and create the meanings for them. That might be fun, too.