| LESSON OVERVIEW
This worksheet looks into an interesting linguistic phenomenon, i.e. the so-called eggcorn. It happens when somebody substitutes a word or phrase for another one that sounds similar or identical. For example saying ‘curve your hunger’ instead of ‘curb your hunger’.
READING & DISCUSSION
First, students learn about the phenomenon through a short article explaining it. Make sure that they understand the meaning of the term and move on to the questions we prepared. Ask students whether there are any eggcorns that they use or notice people using, as well as whether they can give any examples of eggcorns in their mother tongues.
PRACTICE
Next, students need to identify top 10 most common eggcorns by choosing the correct ways of using certain words and phrases. The exercise includes such words and phrases as e.g. a scapegoat, all of a sudden, iced tea, utmost, etc. and their wrong versions commonly used by people. Last two tasks are there to practise using newly learnt phrases – first in writing and then in speaking.
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This worksheet goes well with our lesson plan:
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Love this! I will be teaching this to one of my students tomorrow. It reminds me of a famous TV show in Australia where much of the humour is about eggcorns. Here are some of the funnies. Enjoy! https://www.facebook.com/WSFM1017/videos/2038226813153133
Oh, never heard of that but seems like a funny concept 🙂
This is an interesting and fun concept. However, the second acquisition literature would dissuade from presenting students with two very similar constructs at the same time as it could lead to doubling the “learning burden”.
Well, this is a more of an extra/trivia lesson so I’d not adhere to all the SLA best practices here. I don’t posit that we should do that all the time but in this case, in ex. 3, the only sensible way to show eggcorns “in action” is to show similar expressions that might be misunderstood and let students think which one is the right version – that’s whole fun of this phenomenon :).