Reflections on how language works

Teaching material 3

Reflections on how language works

Enabling pupils to understand how language works through a comparative, plurilingual approach encourages memorisation. Pupils reflect on how language works (metacognition), identify languages that work according to the same principle, become aware of how their own language works and the possible differences with the target language.
You will find here three examples of activities that enable language to be worked on using a comparative multilingual approach: understanding words by identifying the root or linguistic family to which they belong, identifying the gender of words using markers such as articles or adjective endings, or understanding how compound words work (a difficulty in German).

Example 1: Discovering the proximity between languages
Example 2: Recognising the gender of words
Example 3: Understanding how compound words work