Tuesday 28 January 2014

Language note.

Just before the last holidays I was chatting to a year 11 student and asked what he was up to over Christmas and new year.

"Sir I'm going to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep"

This is generally the reaction of a lot of the kids about the holidays. They are knackered and they want to sleep for a very long time. This particular way of saying it though cracked me up. The kids at my school have pretty poor literacy levels as English is often their second or third language. We recently got some shocking statistics about the low reading ages of our key stage 4 students (7-8 years old anyone?) This manifests itself in little tricks or cheats to explain things without using actual words.

By extending the word sleep to about 20 seconds it signifies just how tired he is and how long he will be in bed without needing any extra adjectives or any other words for that matter. Needless to say myself and my colleague Mr.S have appropriated this into our daily banter.

"I need a cofeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" being a fairly regular cry.

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