Activity

Languages / Borrow Words Quiz!

An easy quiz where students think about which language some borrow words came from.

I made this warm-up activity to introduce the topic of languages to my third year students, so it correlates with p. 4 of the New Horizons 3 textbook. It's easy enough; the first few slides are warm-up questions. I give the students one or two minutes to discuss their answers before I ask the class as a whole. For the third question (How many languages are there in the world?), I let kids shout any number and write all of their ideas on the board. I don't tell them the answer because they learn it from the textbook when we do the reading.

After that is the fun part! It's a simple quiz about what langauge different Japanese borrow words (外来語)came from. Students can have a little time to think/discuss with people around them, and then I have them show their answers using their fingers (1, 2, 3, or 4 fingers). This quiz is straightforward, so you can really do it in whatever format you'd like. If you don't like the words I picked, this is where I got them from, so you can always choose your own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eigo_terms

The goal of this activity is to show the kids that they know more about foreign languages than they might think. For example, when I ask how many languages they speak, I always point out that they speak at least two (so they don't say "Japanese only!!"). And I emphasize at the end that, even if they didn't realize it, they know a little Portuguese, Dutch, etc.

Files:
Medium files (requires an account to download) -
  • 4_language powerpoint2~~.pptx (2.24 MB)
  • 11
    Submitted by hal182 May 27, 2024 Estimated time: 10 minutes
    1. Thehungrycaterpillar May 29, 2024

      what a great idea and very interesting.

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