| Body | This activity introduces the benefits of multilingualism to elementary learners. It includes a variety of languages (Africaans, Duch, Gaelic, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, and Swedish).
Learning Outcomes:
Learners will be able to:
- Define multilingualism
- Identify one benefit of multilingualism
- Use holiday greetings in various languages to complete an activity
Mode: Interpersonal, Interpretive
Materials: What is Multilingualism? video, Holiday Greetings Handouts
Procedure:
- Introduce multilingualism to learners by sharing the What is Multilingualism? video.
- At the end of the video, ask learners to brainstorm all of the languages spoken by the people that they know. Include the languages spoken by famous people as well. For example, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is reportedly proficient in Samoan and Tagalog. You may also choose to mention people who speak multiple languages that are important to the local community.
- Optional: Next, ask learners to draw an image of one of the people brainstormed and include reasons why that person might have chosen to/happened to have learned more than one language. Alternatively, if learners are old enough to write, they can write a short diary entry from the perspective of one of the brainstormed people in which they reflect on why it’s great to be multilingual.
- To build learners’ own multilingual skills, provide them with the Holiday Greeting Handouts. On the first page, they will see a series of elves speaking in various languages. On the second page, they will use the map to decipher what type of phrase each of the elves is saying in the other languages (Note: The bolded letter from each phrase corresponds with the countries on the map. When put together, the bolded letter that corresponds with each country spells out “Greetings”).
- Next, review each of the greetings with learners. Display them on the screen and guess how to pronounce each of them. Then, use Google’s pronunciation tools on Google Translate to check the standard pronunciation of each phrase. For reference, the phrases are listed below.
- Ein frohes fest [A joyous holiday - German]
- Feliz Navidad [Merry Christmas - Spanish]
- Habari gani [What’s the news? (Kwanzaa greeting) - Swahili]
- God fortsättning [Happy holiday continuation (the weeks after Christmas and New Year) - Swedish]
- Nollaig shona dhuit [Merry Christmas - Gaelic]
- Een gelukkig nieuwjaar [Happy New Year - Dutch]
- Geseënde Kersfees [Merry Christmas - Afrikaans]
- Chag sameach (חַג שָׂמֵחַ) [Happy Holiday - Hebrew]
- Feliz Natal [Merry Christmas - Portuguese]
- Ask each learner to pick a favorite phrase and greet three friends. Each time friends greet one another, they should try to guess the language their partner is speaking.
Notes:
- There are a variety of holiday greetings to choose from. This activity could easily be adapted to other greetings or languages.
- The Google tools featured in Step 5 showcase standard pronunciation, but educators are encouraged to use and celebrate alternate pronunciations when they are aware of them. For older learners, this activity would also be a great point of departure for researching other pronunciations and/or terms that may be more common in specific communities in the target language.
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