The idea of using a set of words bound together by their date of origin occurred to me first when I came across a book with the title 20th Century Words. Undoubtedly a millennium book, it first appeared to me as a good bedtime read – you just dip into it, read a few entries, then fall asleep with some amazing information in your head. However, I would not be a proper language teacher, if I had not started to examine this book as potential teaching material. Gradually, the night-time reading sessions turned into a very teacher-like pastime, that is, making tasks for the language classroom, and I ended up with a series of activities ready to be used with my students. 

You may wonder what is special about twentieth century words. It was not long ago that we were approaching the millennium and many people looked back to make some kind of an inventory before bidding their farewell to the century. Even if they did not do it themselves, they were exposed to a great number of official lists in the media, thus being forced to think about the passing times. With the activities on twentieth century words in hand, I thought it would be possible for us, English teachers, to make a similar summary of the past century by examining the very thing we teach, the English language and the culture it reflects: explore English through the century and explore the century through English. The present paper intends to suggest ways  to exploit the growth of English vocabulary over the twentieth century in the classroom. Some teaching notes and the language teaching purposes these activities may serve will also be given.

Challenging students’ knowledge of the world 

There are several ways to introduce the topic of twentieth century words. Surprise is a key element of language teaching – anything that raises students’ interest and provides them with some unexpected information can enhance students’ performance and motivation. This is why the first task invites students to place a number of words into two separate groups according to the date of their first appearance in the language (pre-20th century vs. 20th century words). The best way to do it is to dictate a selection of words and ask the students to simply write them down in one of the two groups (see Box 1). The effect is greater if you keep one essential piece of information to yourself, that is, the fact that there are an equal number of words in the two groups. Students will always think that most of the words came into being in the twentieth century, and this false idea is challenged by the task. While discussing the lists and finding the matching pairs, you could supply the exact dates of the first record of the words if the students are keen to know, or with a more advanced group you could ask them to explain why they think that hearing aid, for example, is an older word than contact lens (which is obviously one of the false impressions).

A possible follow-up would be to ask students to think of the topic areas that provided the highest number of new words in the past century. During this brainstorming activity, students will certainly mention the things that are relevant to their life first, such as information technology or sports, especially extreme sports. Then you can surely expect them to draw on their knowledge of the world and think of the great inventions, historical events and technological advances of the twentieth century. If they run out of ideas you could always help them with a list of your own. 

Depending on your students’ age and proficiency level, you could try the following task: read out a set of words, and after hearing them once, students have to name the topics they belong to (see Box 2 overleaf). It is easy to turn it into a memory exercise, students name the topics and try to repeat the words on your list that you had read out. With a careful selection of topic areas, you could use a task like this to make students recall key vocabulary that they have recently learnt or revised. The activity could also be modified to introduce or summarise certain topics. It often happens in the classroom that previously learnt words and expressions are collected and classified under different headings, an activity type which characterises general vocabulary lessons and exam preparation classes as well. In this case, the extra twist of looking at these words as twentieth century creations might make students forget that they are actually revising English vocabulary. 

Once you have a list of key topic areas, you could encourage your students to use their brainpower even more. Get the students into small groups and give one or two topic areas to each group. Their task is to find out in which period these topic areas expanded the fastest and give reasons for their suggestions (see Box 3 below). Through discussing the possibilities students will have to rely on their existing knowledge of the world and information they have obtained through other school subjects. When they have all placed their topic areas on the time line neatly drawn on the board, you could organise a whole group discussion about the resulting order. In the course of the discussion, students will have a genuine purpose to speak and may practise different functions (e.g. agreeing, disagreeing, expressing opinion, giving reason, etc.). The real merit of this as a speaking exercise is that there are no correct responses, the approximate place of the areas can be given only in relation to one another, thus students cannot avoid justifying their ideas in detail. As a follow-up, it is possible to turn this into a vocabulary revision activity that might as well involve a competition between individuals or groups to find who can collect the most words for the selected areas.

A variation for the tasks above could be a combination of reading comprehension, vocabulary practice and intellectual guessing. Students are given passages describing a decade each. The descriptions contain words that were recorded first in the given decade and students have to decide which decades are represented by the passages. The difference lies in the fact that here the words are presented in a textual and historical context. The example passage below (see Box 4) describes people’s free time activities in a certain decade and students need only a few clues to find the right period (e.g. pre-war years, the year of the first Academy Award, soap opera as a radio programme, etc.). With a set of similar passages, students could also be asked to put the texts in a chronological order without having to name the actual decades. This activity integrates several language skills and apart from reading and speaking, students can produce similar descriptions of their own based on a list of characteristic vocabulary. Similarly to the previous tasks, this also enables teachers to include cross-curricular elements in their teaching.

It might be the case that you do not intend to spend a whole lesson or a series of lessons on twentieth century words, but would not mind having some extra tasks in reserve which you could make good use of whenever you have a few extra minutes either at the beginning or end of a lesson. The following ‘guessing game’ could be suggested for this purpose. This vocabulary quiz, which is informative and entertaining at the same time, integrates language practice, cultural and cross-curricular teaching (see Box 5). 

Searching for twentieth century words 

It is always interesting to approach English through our own mother tongue, i.e. Hungarian. Thinking about the development of new vocabulary can open exciting vistas in front of our students and may urge them to make some cross-cultural comparison. Just try to have your students collect words they think appeared in Hungarian in the 1990s. English is a major influence so words of English origin or the direct translation of English terms will be abundant in their lists, e.g. shoppingolni, menedzser asszisztens, humán erõforrás, [to do the shopping, assistant manager, human resources] etc. The topics will also be interesting to consider: politics (spontán privatizáció, rendszerváltás), information technology (fájl, Internet kávézó, e-mail), sports (bungee jumping, vadvízi evezés), very similar to what we would find in English. 

I made a simple survey in my family asking the members to name a few recent Hungarian words and expressions. Some of the words mentioned provided me with some good examples to illustrate the similarities and differences between languages. For example, privatizáció [privatisation] is a word that characterises the 90s in Hungary. The word itself does not sound new, the English equivalent must have existed for quite some time. Looking into this question, I was surprised to learn that the word is from the end of the 1950s and the verb form (privatise) did not actually appear until the Thatcher-era when it became standard economic practice. 

I also listened carefully to the conversations we have at home and I noticed that the paper towel we use in the kitchen we almost always refer to as Szilvia, the brand name of one particular type, which is obviously the influence of a silly TV commercial. It might appear only in our family idiolect but the phenomenon itself is not strange to English, just think of words like Kleenex, Teflon, Frisbee or Xerox, all twentieth century coinages. I strongly recommend that you make a similar survey in the classroom, but students could do their own investigation outside school as well (see Box 6 below). The ensuing activity of comparing Hungarian and English could generate a discussion about languages being time-bound, how language development is influenced by the current socio-economic conditions, how it follows the development of other aspects of human life, and how modernisation influences vocabulary use. 

A similarly interesting activity could be to hunt for twentieth century words and make it the purpose of a reading activity. Authentic texts are obviously the best to use for this purpose but many semi-authentic coursebook texts could be equally well utilised. I tried it myself with a Newsweek article, looking for words that I thought appeared in the language later than 1900. The article was on the status of women in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and I found some characteristics examples, such as perestroika, cybernetics, reproductive rights, pro-Europe or EU standards. I almost fell into the trap and included the words communism and feminism in the list but then I realised that they were both words from the nineteenth century. 

Through grouping the words found in texts, it is easy to examine how new words appear in the language. For example, the words from the article mentioned above could lead to the following comments. In our English-dominated world sometimes it is English that needs to import words from other languages. Perestroika is just one of these foreign borrowings which apart from political words include culinary vocabulary (pizza, courgette) and technological terms (fuselage, hangar). Cybernetics or nuclear are examples for twentieth century coinages that were created to describe the latest scientific and technical developments. Many existing words when combined with others take up a new meaning, just like reproductive rights or gender equality. The regular use of certain suffixes and prefixes can also result in new words: pro-Europe, ex-Soviet. The influence of journalese and our accelerated way of life can be detected in the excessive use of abbreviations and acronyms (this term itself is a twentieth century creation): UNICEF, EU, OPEC etc. The historical, political, economic and social dimensions of lexical items, such as the Berlin wall, private and public sector, Range Rover, could also be emphasised and explored. It is a linguistic investigation, but keeping it simple, we can raise our students’ interest and make them think about the development of languages. It is possible again to sensitise our students to the similarities and differences between languages – they could look for the Hungarian equivalents of the selected words, consider in what form they exist and what connotations they have in our native tongue (see Box 7). 

Conclusion

The aim of the present paper has been to show a new aspect from which English vocabulary could be explored, revised and practised. I have introduced a set of activities that focus on English vocabulary from the twentieth century and argued that examining words on the basis of their date of origin could bring fresh insight into our view on languages and enliven the English classroom. Although from a methodological point of view, these activities do not represent any new development or original teaching method, they are suitable for the purposes of modern language teaching: apart from vocabulary practice and skill development, they could be used for cross-curricular and cross-cultural teaching. Since they involve a wide spectrum of sub-tasks from simple word search to highly specialised discussions, they can be used at different levels with minimal alterations.
  It is true that this kind of an exploration requires genuinely motivated students. Nevertheless, I believe that the activities above provide a fascinating, motivating, at times challenging way for our students to work on English vocabulary and think about language development. It is also possible that it is mainly language teachers who find this approach to vocabulary enjoyable and useful. In that case, I can only recommend including it in the language programme of teacher-training courses. I am convinced that these or some similar activities could help to raise both future and practising teachers’ awareness towards the development of languages and urge them to constantly examine the language they use day by day. Words are a true reflection of the times that bring them into existence so if we keep our eyes open we may witness how languages change together with the world around us. Thinking about this, I already feel quite tempted to start making my own collection of words of the twenty-first century.

Notes
 

1. This paper is the written version of a workshop held at the Words, words, words conference organised by Oxford University Press in Budapest, March 22-23, 2002.(Back)

References

Ayto, J. (1999). Twentieth century words. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Power, C. (2002). The shackles of freedom. Newsweek. March 18, 2002.
 

Appendix

Key to the activities

1.
parachute (1785) 
acid rain (1859) 
old-age pension (1879) 
department store (1887) 
contact lens (1888) 
milk shake (1889) 
spaceship (1894) 
motion picture (1896) 
aspirin (1899) 

bungee jumper (1979)
greenhouse effect (1929)
welfare state (1941)
supermarket (1933)
hearing aid (1922)
cheeseburger (1938)
astronaut (1929)
cinema (1913)
vitamin (1912)

3. 
1900s – 1930s: Cars, Aviation, Psychology, Radio, War, Film, Transport
1940s – 1950s: War, Nuclear power, Space, Media
1960s: Youth culture, Music, Media, Drugs, Space
1970s – 1980: Computers, Environment, Media, Finance, 
1990s: Politics, Media, Internet

4. the 1930s

5. 
1-b – from Karel Capek’s play
2-c – coined by Chaplin as a contrast to a film (talkie)
3-a – means wonderful, fantastic (made popular by the Mary Poppins 
film)
4-a – a Black English euphemism
5-c – changed into kiwi for political reasons
6-b – hurtling down slopes in a large ball
7-b – Pavlov (the Hungarians are Bíró László and Gábor Dénes)