 Re: dealing with swear words
Kids will sometimes ask about swear words to test you out. I once had a group where one of the boys said " What does F*** off mean?" to the accompaniment of sniggers from all his friends -it was clear they all knew perfectly well. So very straight faced I said "it means Go away. But it's not pronounced like that ... " and then proceeded to drill it, and drill it and drill it. We did choral repetition, group repetition, individual repetition, whispered repetition , say it happily/sadly repetition ... and at each stage I picked up on their lousy pronunciation and (sternly) made them do it again. I never had the problem again.
It does depend on your relationship with the class though. Kids are fascinated by swear words and with teenagers it's sometimes best to go with it. My son was fascinated when he saw that the German dictionary we bought him for school had a whole page of swear words. It's the only thing I've ever seen him really sit down and study .... |