Wales: the road sign with the wrong Welsh

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Wales: the land of the dragon, one surprising Welsh story per episode) is a short documentary about a real road sign in Swansea. A single narrator explains why road signs in Wales are in two languages (Welsh is an official language there, with more than half a million speakers, and new signs put the Welsh first), then tells how the city needed a sign to keep big lorries off a road in 2008, sent the English words by email to a translator and put the Welsh answer on the sign. The look-closer moment: the Welsh words say nothing about lorries, they say "I am not in the office at the moment", an automatic email. Welsh speakers saw the mistake and the city took the sign down. The Welsh sentence is shown on a drawn sign and never read aloud, and no one is named or blamed. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple, and the imperative look; no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (translator, automatic email, office).

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script. Each pack is a one-page PDF with the text, three pictures, the key words and the 10 questions: a pupil pack, and a teacher pack with the answers highlighted. It also has a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key. It has no lesson plan. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Which languages do you see on the signs in your town?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words road, sign, city and language, and be able to read years such as 2008. The pack's key words explain the new words (official, million, lorry, email, mistake).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged languages-places-stories (5e, "Des langues, des lieux, des histoires", Cycle 4) and the-united-kingdom: two languages on the roads of Wales, and a funny real mistake. The episode targets CEFR level A2-.