dealing with swear words
 

Hi everyone,
This morning I had a class with two of my very young students ( about 8 ) and one of them said : do you know
"what the f..."means ? Does it mean anything? I said : " Yes I do" but I didn't translate into French. I just said it's not polite and you're too young to learn swear words. I personally think that even swear words should be taught to students learning a foreign language( it's also part of a language ) but I think they're a bit young!!!. What do you think?

Re: dealing with swear words
 

Yes, I agree. Probably too young for swear words in any language. I probably wouldn't even have admitted that I knew what it meant as by refusing to translate it you may have aroused their curiosity even further. I had one case where a boy had learnt a new word and would say it whenever he could. To shut him up I told him that he could repeat it for us all when his mother came to pick him up at the end of the lesson - shut him up a treat!

With older students (18+) I'd deal with it as it came up - I use a lot of authentic materials such as songs, magazine articles, blog entries etc and you see a fair bit of it. I'll always remember one guy who used W****R a lot. The problem was that he always pronounced it wrongly, with an 'o' as in 'hot' rather than 'a' as in 'cat' - whenever on a rant or wanting to be particularly emphatic he'd say the word and people would just laugh at him. I had to take him to one side and actually drill it as I couldn't bear to see him being laughed at any more! True story.

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 ....

Re: dealing with swear words
 

That's great! I can't wait for it to happen to me again. I will do this for sure.