Matériau didactiques

The purpose of this activity is the exploration of the concept of linguistic borrowing in relation to the topic of the Oceans. The activity is divided into four sections:

1. The first section is called 'The oceans in the world'. On Worksheet 1, the participants have to give some information about the oceans in the language they know best. Worksheet 3 provides a table with the word 'Ocean' in various languages (German, French, Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish). The pupils are asked to explain why the word looks the same in many languages and to add the word in other languages they know.

2. The second section is named 'Waves and wind' and is concerned with the description and measuring of waves.

3. The third part is called 'When the waves grow bigger and bigger'. This section includes three worksheets. Worksheet 2 is concerned with different kinds of winds and storms. The students link the names of storms to their original words and they have to find out which languages created the original words (Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Greek). On the third worksheet, the pupils have to find out about borrowings in the English language. The pupils are supposed to guess why terms like tsunami are loaned by other languages. Then they look up some more loanwords in other languages (Switzerland Romansh, Spanish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Gaelic, Dutch and Hindi). Finally, the class is asked to think of English loanwords borrowed to other languages.

4. Finally, the pupils discuss their learning process.

Duration: 6x60