I know index.hu gets more readers than this humble blog of mine, still there might be a few people out there who are reading this but would never get there.
I've just come across this lovely piece of news about ATM machines that can 'speak' Cockney rhyming slang. Read the whole story here, in Hungarian.
For the time being I'm of course more interested in how this could be used in your classroom. Of course, Cockney rhyming slang (CRS from now on) is possibly not your primary focus, but it seems to me that this newsflash has a very good proportion of topical content (ie. technology) and culture (viz. Cockney slang), so this should be a good starting point to introduce the topic and some related activities.
Apart from the obvious "receptive, factual" type of tasks, where you would simply introduce a list of CRS items, and get your students to guess what eg. "pears" stands for in CRS, you might get on the more creative side by making your students come up with their rendition of their, say, iPod / mobile menu in "Cockney slang", which, in essence, will be a list of rhyming words/phrases.
It's not an easy task, but if I had an option of CRS language on my mobile, I'd see "big blocks" for my message inbox; a "flock" for alarm clock and possibly "mist balls" for missed calls.
Let me know if you have any more ideas!
Any comments?