Dry cleaning babel

Over the past few weeks, I've continued to go to Little Mongolia for language exchange. Mostly it's me teaching English in Monglish. A couple sessions back, one of the women D told me she found a work gig via a Mongolian acquaintance. She's had other leads in the 6 months she's been here, but nothing ever worked out, usually because of language issues, e.g. awkwardness in elderly care when the seniors kept talking and she kept smiling. This time it was a dry cleaner in Lafayette, a place that they didn't know much about except that it was 5 stops away on BART. D's friend N asked "There's a lot of white people in Lafayette, right?". Compared to Oakland, the answer was an emphatic yes.

D started her job on Monday, so I felt obligated to make our Tuesday session more relevant to her work. I looked online for ESL resources that might have a practical lesson "at the dry cleaner". With some help from Google Book Search, I found the book pictured left, targeted at Spanish-speaking ESL learners: 3 pages out of 264 about dry cleaning and laundry. I was working in Berkeley on Tuesday, so I went to the central branch of the Berkeley Public Library and xeroxed their copy of the book. That evening we had our language exchange. In two days D had already learned the words for starch, button, complaint, ticket, suit, and press. Her co-workers are 2 Koreans who speak English and Korean and 3 Mexicans, 2 who speak English and Spanish, and one who only speaks Spanish. She said communication is difficult.

Meanwhile her husband A asked me for the English names for the different cuts of beef. At the grocery store, he can tell the difference between chuck and flank and round, but doesn't know the English words. Me, I have no idea, so I had to get this image (right) from wikipedia for a future lesson.

[image credits: amazon and Ysangkok via wikipedia, with thanks to fileformat.info for SVG>raster conversion]

Comments

[emby]

I remember getting drawn into Alton Brown's special on the Food Network about different cuts of beef. If it's online or available on DVD anywhere, it might be of help with pronounciation and such!

Here's another map of beef with additional names.

[Jaspal]

That was the most frightening map I've ever seen. Still, thanks for the pointer. And thanks to Christian for sending me the Mongol Peace Corps cookbook offline.

[Mike]

Don't forget the importance of phrasal verbs (see my email) and roleplay--maybe elicit (ah, that tefl terminology!) some words/phrases you might hear in a dry cleaner, or a typical dialogue (greeting the customer, asking their name, spelling, have them run through some simple role plays. (A walks into shop, B greets, etc).

You can develop a dialogue on the board (draw two people, with a dry cleaner's sign and counter), say A is customer B employee. Ask what A says ("Hello. How can I help you", B: "I"d like to have this cleaned" etc). They give it to you, you write as is and improve with them or just improve it a bit yourself and then write it up.

get them to practice as a group (all guys A, women B, etc) then in pairs, then in groups but start erasing words so they have to remember it--leave the content/key words up to help them. So "How can I help you?" becomes ____ can I help ___? And reduce it all to one word each line or so.

You can make it even more realistic with reali (another tefl term, this one just meaning "real stuff"). Bring in a few shirts, maybe different colors, with a button missing, etc. Do the board work as above, with extras like "Sorry, that's not mine") and give them back the wrong stuff when they are role playing the customer's role. Do it again and again, get them laughing.

Ahh tefl. Sometimes I miss that.

[Mike]

Oh, here's the site I mentioned in my email. Looks like they pared down the paid bits so more of it is free again.
http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?sectionType=listsummary&catid=58137&docid=145131

[Jaspal]

Mike, I appreciate the advice. After reading it, I'm embarrassed to say what my teaching has looked like so far. But that's why I asked you. :) Hopefully it'll be helpful to other folks, too.

[Anna]

Nice post