Pixel International Conferences

This talk will address how to build motivation among learners by building a love of words and language enquiry.

We want learners to want to extend their language competence, extend their vocabulary, deepen their knowledge.

The talk will outline how we can use aspects of English and Indo-European language history to build motivation and a delight in learning a broader vocabulary in their target language.

We will look at word histories – the etymology of common words in modern languages and how they got there, using interesting stories about unusual words to spur learners’ fascination with language.

We will look at loanwords, how and when words were borrowed from world languages and how they often changed their meaning along the way.

And we will look at the cognates in other world languages that learners can learn to recognise.

We will discuss what kinds of word histories can be used to engage, excite and motivate learners.

We will look at deep history, the roots of English and Indo-European (and even the languages before them), suggesting how we can use these thrilling historic stories of the linguistic developments and migrations of 5000 -6000 years ago to inform and engage students.

We will touch briefly on how the triple sciences of archaeology, genetics and linguistics lead us to a better understanding of the history of languages in and around Europe, and its connection to the history of European peoples, and will look at how to make use of this to inspire our learners.

Using this fresh and fascinating content in the language classroom is not aimed to provide detailed knowledge of the history, nor to displace more usual; communicative activities but to add new types of content, and to provide extra skill development in constructing meaning through reading, listening, speaking communicatively and writing about a more substantive set of factual topics.

The talk will suggest practical activities and project ideas that can be used for this.
These will use all these aspects of language history as - including cognates, borrowings, word histories, etymologies  - to add a new dimension to lessons and build learners’ love of language play and language enquiry.

Downloadable worksheets and project planning worksheets will be provided from the speaker’s website.

There will be 5-10 minutes for Q&A at the end of the talk.