The history behind brunch

Justa | Dec 05, 2017Apr 27, 2023

LESSON OVERVIEW

This vocabulary lesson plan is based on a video titled “The Hungover Origins of Brunch” by Great Big Story. The objective of the lesson is to teach students portmanteaus, that is linguistic blends of words such as hangry, smog, romcom and many others.

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

First of all, the worksheet starts with a short discussion on the basis of the video. There are just four short questions. The video concerns the idea of brunch and is surprising and nice to watch. Then, students need to look into some examples of combination of words which create very popular terms. Help your students to understand how words are blended.

PORTMANTEAUS

In the next task of this vocabulary lesson plan, students try to come up with words which make up the listed portmanteaus (AKA blends). There are definitions to help them. Therefore, to practise new vocabulary, the next exercise consists of questions with words from the previous task. If it’s possible, students can work in pairs and answer them. Next, the situation is reversed. Now, students need to look at the words and guess how they combine. After that, they have to choose 3 words from exercise 5 and make questions with them. Finally, they should ask each other the questions they’ve made.

ADDITIONAL TASK

There is also an extra task (see Teacher’s Version) for students who will be really interested in the topic. This task can be their homework. Students have to find 10 other portmanteaus by blending words from boxes A and B.
The lesson should take around 45 minutes (incl. the video) and is for B2 students.

RELATED WORKSHEET – FUNNY LANGUAGE MISTAKES

We’ve added a new worksheet that isn’t directly connected with portmanteus but looks at other interesting linguistic phenomenon. What it focuses on is 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’.
In this worksheet, your students will learn about the phenomenon through a short article. Next, they will need to identify top 10 most common eggcorns by choosing the correct ways of using certain words and phrases. Last two tasks are there to practise using new phrases – first in writing and then orally.

WORKSHEETS

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