The Northern Ireland Curriculum programmes of study for Key Stage Two stipulate that pupils should 'understand a wide range of colloquial expressions'. This pacey comedy all about misunderstandings and miscommunication will achieve that and more!

Da from BBC NI's Give My Head Peace receives a visit from Caroline, an Education Welfare Officer. Caroline explains that she has taken on an special project: Simon and Cheryl, two primary-school children, want to teach Da how to communicate. Of course Da is not convinced that he needs any help – in fact, he thinks can teach these kids a trick or two! But when he meets Simon and Cheryl he uses American slang in an effort to be cool and talk 'the way kids do'. They find this embarrassing and ask him to speak normally.

Throughout the programme, Simon, Cheryl and Caroline strive to teach Da the difference between colloquial language, standard English and the vernacular, in a variety of situations. Da quickly discovers that you can't read the news as if you were talking to your friends, that formal language doesn’t work in an informal situation, and that giving directions to tourists in the Belfast vernacular only leaves them more confused.

Da feels disheartened because he can't communicate properly, but just as he is about to give up trying, he thinks of his cousin Barbara, a lawyer. She's the perfect example of all three ways of speaking – when she's around him and her family, she uses the Belfast vernacular; with her clients she uses colloquial terms; and with other lawyers she employs standard English. And Da triumphantly introduces the children to a fourth type of language: gobbledygook – as heard in some courtrooms.
 

 
By the end of the programme pupils should be able to:

 
WORKSHEETS

 
Click on the arrows below to download the worksheets for this programme, or all the worksheets for this series.