Why Spelling Matters

Sometimes it is hard to impress on non-native speakers of English why spelling matters. To understand the humor found in these misspelled signs, if you are an intermediate level English language learner, you may need a native speaker of English to explain. Beware, however, that sometimes explaining what is funny destroys the fun.

Buzzfeed from a few years ago gets complete credit for finding these amusing signs.  This link will take you there to view several photos. Whenever you travel and you see signs that you suspect are written in English or a mixture of English and the local language, snap a photo and discuss your understanding of the sign with a fellow English speaker. You can learn a lot of language this way.  This is funny English and dangerous English.

Remember: Spelling counts!

   

Play, Blow, Break, Split, Run, Fly, Fall, Light

I am a big fan of vocabulary building, so I am always looking for ways to squeeze a little extra vocabulary into any class.  This is a great lesson for any level, primarily to illustrate how single words in English can have several  meanings. This particular activity ties in well to Picturing English as it appeals very much to the visual language learner.  

You could also use this activity in a grammar class.  Students can ask each other questions using the vocabulary. Blow, break, split, run, fly, fall, and light are irregular verb forms. Play is a regular verb that ends with a "y" but it's preceded by a vowel. The spelling of the past tense or past participle, then, is "played", not "plaied." You can use the video as an opportunity to review a small set of irregular verbs plus their past tense and participial forms. In addition, the students get to see how these irregular verbs come up in every day life and why it's a good idea to learn them.  

My Life As a Cra_?

Often the way students spell words is directly connected to the way that they pronounce the words. In this case, a German-speaking student could not hear the difference between the unvoiced and voiced final consonants, 'p' and 'b.' Consequently, the title of the student's essay unintentionally created the image of dog poop when she had been carefully observing a crab. Although German does have most of the same consonants as English, when the voiced consonants come at the end of a word, they are often cut short so that a 'd' sounds nearly identical to a 't'. The more that you know about the language background of your students, the better you can anticipate some of their errors.