10 ways to tackle coronavocab: #1 Coronacoinages

When I recently asked ELT teachers on Twitter how much their students wanted to talk about the pandemic, I was unsurprised to get a mix of answers. A few said they didn’t want to talk about it at all, some said their students were keen to talk about the situation and they felt it was good to let them get it out. Most were somewhere in-between. Comments included “no more than any other topic” and “it inevitably crops up”.

If you’d like to tackle the topic with your students, over the next 10 mini-posts I'll be suggesting different angles you could take and activities you could try or adapt. You don't need to make a big deal of it, it could just be a quick 10-minute activity. And you might be able to work in some useful ideas about English vocabulary in general too.

Which words to choose?

I'll be suggesting a range of possible vocab items in each post. Please select the words you want to focus on so they're appropriate for your students taking into account their age, level and interests, and don't overload them with all the words in each set. Working through 10 or 12 new words gets boring and repetitive, even for advanced learners, and they really won't remember them. Pick a handful, explore how they're used in context, draw out some general points and just have fun with them.

1 Coronacoinages

One of the more light-hearted effects of the coronavirus pandemic is the way it’s inspired a wave of new coinages, many taking the corona- prefix as a starting point. English is a fabulously creative language when it comes to combining words and parts of words to create new ones and it’s a really useful aspect of language to highlight with students to encourage them to notice how other words are made up of meaningful parts. A greater awareness of morphology can then help learners to decode new, unknown words they come across in future. Remember that these activities aren't about learning these particular words – which will likely (hopefully!) have slipped out of usage in a year's time – it's about noticing word parts and about having fun with English.

Some examples in context:

Take a mini coronacation by driving by these landmarks.

Many of us are on what's been called the coronacoaster, experiencing sudden ups and downs.

The coronacrisis has hit the company hard.

Expert advice before you grab the clippers for that coronacut.

Manipur still remains a corona-free state.

The management said that the park had been made corona-proof.

A local psychologist offers tips to ease anxiety in the coronaverse.

Panic buying saw the country's supermarkets stripped of flour as many turned to isobaking.

Name three things that are helping you get through isolife right now

All it's going to take is one covidiot who will ruin it for everyone else.

It's also a good idea to go over these guidelines with your quaranteam group as well.

In these quarantimes, some of us are missing our access to hairdressers and it SHOWS.

Often, the loudest voices are the ones with misinformation; we're having an infodemic.

New and unfamiliar sights await: hand-sanitizer dispensers scattered on every surface, employees smizing through their face masks.

Activities:

• Pick a handful of new words and get students to guess what they mean by dividing them into their parts.
• Find examples of the words in use (use the examples above or trying googling them) and get students to work out the meaning from context. Images to go with the examples would work well too.

My attempt at 'smizing' - smiling with my eyes when wearing a face mask

• Get students to make up some of their own coronaspeak words to describe phenomena they’ve experienced.

For more about emerging coronaspeak and some useful definitions, check out Tony Thorne's excellent series of blog posts. You'll also find a few of these new coinages already appearing in online learner's dictionaries - Macmillan has 'Open Dictionary' entries for coronacoaster, quarantini and infodemic (among others) and smize appears in several online dictionaries. And for more ideas and activities for teaching vocab generally, take a look at ETpedia Vocabulary: