Teaching and learning materials

The activities referred to in this card take place in three stages : the first, entitled Presenting my first name should take 4 sessions of 60 minutes during which learners looks up the origin and meaning of their first anmes, interview colleagues and present the ethymology of their first names, tell and listen to anecdotes about choice of names, and, in the domain of morphology, look up the masculine and feminine forms of first names. Then, they observe and compose literary forms which are called acrostics and finally they listen to the song Le Téléphone, completing the text with the names as sung by Nino Ferrer. They also look up the equivalent of these names in Polish.

In the second part, Presenting my surname, planned to take 2 sessions of 60 minutes each, learners observe the forms of surnames and discuss the provenance of these surnames. They also discuss the reasons behind the presence of foreign surnames in Poland. They observe and analyse the first names and surnames of newly-born children in Warsaw and, finally, they try to identify the nationality of the tenants of a housing block.

In the third and last part, called Names of kings and queens at the Polish court, planned to take 3 sessions of 45 minutes, learners recognise the kings in the photos, establish the chronology of the Polish monarchy, find the equivalent of the first names in different languages, they discover the nicknames of the kings in French and learn about foreign kings at the Polish court.

Languages involved : Polish, French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Czech and others (depending on the first names and the surnames of the pupils).

Approach: Awakening to languages

Type of material: sound

Source:
Projet Ja-Ling : Dans l’univers des noms et des prénoms. Conception et réalisation : Dorota Szpryngwald, sous la direction de Janina Zielinska. Pologne.
http://jaling.ecml.at/pdfdocs/suppots/poland/support_prenoms.pdf