This theme enables teachers to further develop text investigation through encounters with a range of languages and by translate activities already developed within the literacy hour into a foreign language context:

· The teacher can show the pupils what a verb looks like in a given language and ask them to find as many verbs as possible in a text in the same language.

· Using linguistic expertise from within the class, pupils can share a simple sentence with the same meaning in many different languages e.g The world is very big and I am small. Then the verbs , nouns, adjectives, and connectives can start to be highlighted as well as comparative word order.

· An online translator can be used. They are usually more accurate with straightforward non-idiomatic sentences

· A classroom display could feature examples of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs in a range of different languages.
· Text genres: Go to a foreign language search engine and find some examples of different text types. For example; a horoscope, a football report, an advert, a poem, a recipe. Place the texts around the class and ask pupils to identify the texts. This will help the pupils to determine the universal features of a particular text type. The following links will help you to gather examples:

Yahoo Demark
Yahoo France
Yahoo Germany
Yahoo Italy
Yahoo Norway
Yahoo Spain
Yahoo Sweden
Yahoo Brazil
Yahoo China
Yahoo India
Yahoo Japan

· A completely unknown text could be given to the pupils and they could be asked to launch an investigation focusing on the following features:

Investigating a text

1. Can you identify any nouns? Do any of them have capital letters?

2. Can you identify any verbs? What is the position of the verbs in the sentence?

3. Can you identify the root verb? How do the endings change?

4. Can you identify any adjectives or adverbs? Are they positioned before or after the noun or verb?

5. Can you identify the question words? Are there any common characteristics/patterns?

6. Is the punctuation the same as English?

7. Can you find any linking words?

8. Which words look similar to the English words?

9. Which words occur the most?

10. Are there any pictures and diagrams that might help you understand the passage?

11. How is the passage structured? Does this give you any clues to its meaning?

12. What do you think the text is about?

2. Another useful language tool: Word frequency indicator.