It’s a bit of an end of year project for me with the 13-14 year-olds that I teach. A short, essentially creative graphic design assignment with a language twist. In short, we take homophones (a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning), and design pictograms that illustrate the two different meanings.
I’ve written about the activity before, and that post can be found here:https://petersansom.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/homophones-clil-art-and-english-assignment/
This year I did much the same again, asking the pupils to produce a pair of matching pictograms that illustrate the contrasts in terms of language and meaning. This year I offered the possibility to produce a handmade drawn result or a more graphic digitally made result. Below you can see a few of the results.
All well and good you might say. But for the last few months I have had two new additions to the class, Ira and Iryna from the Ukraine. They’ve been two fantastic additions to the group. Despite all that is of course playing out in their lives, they have been enthusiastic and extremely creative members of the class. They have enjoyed the freedoms of the art lessons, that were rather different to the style of teaching they experienced back home. I should also add that their level of English has allowed them to slip easily into the bilingual class that has been their educational home since arriving.
When I explained the homophones project to the class and set them to work on an initial bit of brainstorming and sketching out of possibilities I turned to Ira and Iryna, had they understood the project? Had they grasped the eccentricities of this particular corner of the English language? I didn’t have to worry, with an excited look on their faces they announced that they wanted to do the project using Ukrainian homophones, and off they went making plans for the illustrations for examples from their own language that they were able to share and explain to me and others in the class.
As it turned out there are homophones that the two languages share, such as organ (the musical instrument) and organ (the part of the body), but there were others that in English showed absolutely no connection at all!
Peter Sansom 