Shellfish

It's always interesting to see what words confuse my students, especially words that sound the same or have similar spellings. As a native English speaker, I take it for granted that these words have different meanings, but for somebody learning English, it is often hard to distinguish. I have the same problem with Spanish and Catalan.

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One example from our worksheet today for Forrest Gump:

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Shrimp is a type of shellfish, but is also means:

a) pink

b) big

c) tiny

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The first thing my students wanted to know was the meaning of shrimp, gambas. Then after re-reading the question, many of them got confused. Doesn't selfish mean egoísta? Yes. Confusion... Next I re-read the question. Ohhh, okay, while selfish does mean egoísta, this question is asking about the word shellfish... mariscos.

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Questions like these often catch me off guard. When the first student asked me about selfish, I didn't think anything. But when I got the answer a couple more times, I was a little confused. It's funny, though, because then I see this confusion repeated over five more class periods.

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Two other moments of confusion occurred during my Valentine's Day lesson. In one worksheet, my students had a list of English expressions using the word "heart" where they had to read a short story (I wrote it about my friends Terra and Zach) and then try to guess the meaning of the expressions that were used. One was "From the bottom of my heart". I heard some chuckling from the back of the classroom as students tried to figure out the meaning of the expression, roughly translated by them as desde el culo de mi corazón... or "from the ass of my heart." After finishing their worksheets, I also passed out conversation heart candies from home. They had fun reading the sayings on them and asking me what they meant. One they were confused about was "xoxo", hugs and kisses. I didn't think much about that one until later when I shared my last bag of conversation hearts with my roommates and Guillem kept all of the xoxo's for himself. In Catalan, xoxo means the same thing as "fanny" in British English. And that's all I have to say about that.