Learning

supermarket and
grocery store
vocabulary using
pictures English
lesson
Vocabulary for a supermarket and
grocery items
In this English lesson you will learn the vocabulary for inside
a supermarket and grocery items using pictures with words.
There is also a large list of vocabulary for things you might
expect to find in a supermarket.
Supermarket and groceries
vocabulary
1 Supermarket trolley 2: Bread and cakes shelves 3: Small
plastic bags for fruit and vegetables 4: Meat 5: Butcher 6:
Drinks
7: House hold items 8: Paper towels 9: Grocery items in
trolley 10: aisle 11: Stack of tinned food 12: Price of grocery
item
13: customer buying fish 14: Fishmonger 15: Dairy products
16: Frozen food 17: Man in mobility scooter and queue of
people
18: Express checkout (basket and 10 items or less
only) 19: Cash register or till 20: Checkout assistant 21:
Plastic carrier bags
22: Shopping basket full of groceries 23: Shopper leaving
with carrier bags full of groceries
Vocabulary for near and around a
checkout

List of useful vocabulary for

supermarkets and grocery stores
Electronics Money-back Debit card Grand opening M
Household guarantee Cheque sale Su
goods Refundable Cash Closeout sale M
Sporting goods Return policy Cash only Price To
Beverages Department Banknote Half price To
Fruit Bakery Coin 20% off sh
Vegetables Frozen food Discount Lift To
Fish Dairy products coupon Escalator St
Meat Canned goods Change Warehouse Sh
Groceries Delicatessen Sales tax Customer Tr
Chemist’s (UK) Pet supplies Purchase Supervisor Sh
Fresh flowers Cosmetics Delivery Manager ba
Cashier Guarantee Ticket Sales assistant Ti
Check-out Credit card Receipt Barcode reader Ex
counter On
Dairy products counter
Dairy products are food and drinks that are made using milk.
Orange juice is a fruit, but can purchased from the dairy
product aisle.
To learn more about dairy products Click here to view a
more indepth English lesson on dairy products

Common vegetables you can buy

in a supermarket
English lesson on vegetables click on the link to view an
English lesson on vegetables. A free PDF of fruit and
vegetables is available with this lesson.

Fruit you can buy in a supermarket

English lesson on fruit click on the link to view an English
lesson on fruits and vegetables. A free PDF of fruit and
vegetables is available with this lesson.
Things you can buy in a bakery in the supermarket

Other things you can buy in a

supermarket

Presenting countable and uncountable nouns

My favourite start to a lesson on this grammar point is eliciting or
presenting nouns which can be both countable and uncountable,
e.g. asking them to draw some pizzas/ some pizza, some apple/
some apples, etc. Higher level classes could match work/ works,
air/ airs etc with their two different meanings. Students can then
use these examples to make generalisations about whether they
personally are more likely to need to say "some work" or "some
works" etc, and then make the same judgements about other things
like "some watermelon" or "some watermelons" and "some paper"
or "some papers". Although this might seem more complicated that
trying to present clear examples of nouns that are just countable or
uncountable, giving the "exceptions" (which are actually very
common) first is the only way of avoiding them coming up with
questions like "Isn’t it okay to say ‘two beers’?" to mess up your
nice tidy explanation and boardwork.
You can take a more TTT (Test Teach Test) approach by asking
them to find things they did more than their partner last week/
weekend with "How much/ How many" questions and then elicit
which nouns they could use in those questions and why.
Another option is to get them using some countable and
uncountable nouns you give them and then ask them to recall and
analyse the grammar of the nouns they were using in the next stage
of the lesson. For example, they could spend five or ten minutes
miming sentences on the worksheet you give them like "You are
going to cut some wood" for their partner to guess, then turn the
handout over and try to remember the forms they were using, e.g.
by selecting from "You are going to cut some woods/ some wood".
After checking their answers they can try to analyse why that form
was used each time. The fact that they are asked to remember or
work out what the forms in the original sentences were rather than
to choose which are wrong means it is much easier to create
example sentences than it would be if the teacher had to search for
twenty sentences which are actually wrong. It also means you can
deal with rules, generalisations and differences in meaning all at
the same time.
Many other popular TEFL games are adaptable in this way, e.g. the
definitions game. Give students some nouns, approximately half
countable and half uncountable, and ask them to define which one
they have chosen without saying that noun until their partner
works out what they are speaking about. They then turn over the
worksheet and try to add "some", "a" and "s" to make them the
same as the forms they were using before.
A similar activity where they use the language straightaway and
work out the patterns for themselves later is to dictate examples of
something until they work out what the category is, e.g. "hotels",
"B&Bs", "youth hostels" etc for "accommodation". You can then
help them spot the general pattern of which words are uncountable
(the general categories) and which are countable (the specific
examples). The exact same activity works for phrases to make
things countable, e.g. guessing that "a slice", "a crumb" and "a loaf"
are all talking about bread.
Another way of introducing uncountable words for general
categories is to get the students to match categories and examples,
brainstorm more examples for each category, and then label each
word as countable or uncountable.
For countable and uncountable nouns that mean the same thing,
they can match them (e.g. "staff" with "employee"), try to spot that
there is one uncountable noun and one countable noun in each
pair, and then try to guess which is which each time. They then
turn over the worksheet and try to remember which nouns are
countable and which aren’t, e.g. by adding "some", "a" and/ or "s"
to the right nouns.
You could also add a Webquest component to a TTT lesson, e.g. by
asking them choose which is more popular from "some cheese"/
"some cheeses", "some air"/ "some airs" etc, then to use a search
engine to find out.
Practising countable and uncountable nouns
As at the presentation stage, often the most useful things they can
do are brainstorming, categorising, matching, drawing and miming.
Miming and drawing can be made more fun by also giving them
sentences to act out which are unlikely but not actually impossible
like "I ate lots of pizzas" and "I put some glasses in the window".
You can also base your practice activities on topics that are likely to
bring up lots of countable and uncountable nouns. These include
holidays (e.g. complaints), cooking, stocking up, packing, things on
your CV, the economy, and things in the home. For example,
students can decide together what to take with them from a
crashed plane before they try to cross the desert to the nearest
town, what to take backpacking, or how to stock their shop. You
could also teach them opinions language and then ask them to rank
lists of countable and uncountable nouns, e.g. "money", "nice
friends" and "appearance" for a possible future wife or husband.
Other activities you can do with the topic of food are describing
recipes, deciding on how much food is needed for a particular
event, and brainstorming uses for amounts of food such as "a
teaspoon of salt" and "lots of milk".
It takes some setting up, but the famous Yes/ No questions
guessing game Twenty Questions can be adapted for this grammar
point. For example, you can ask students to guess which place is
being thought of by asking questions like "Is there much natural
light?" and "Are there many people?"
Asking questions can also be turned into more of a roleplay, e.g. by
asking them to continue asking questions until they find out what is
wrong with the flat they are thinking of buying, holiday they have
been recommended or job they are interviewing for. This can be
given more of a grammar focus by telling the person asking
questions whether the problem is related to a countable or
uncountable noun.
You can also do more personalised activities. Give students a mix of
countable and uncountable nouns and/ or expressions that go with
them like "one or two", "a dozen" and "a carton of". They then work
together to find things in common with their partner related to
those words (e.g. "I get through two cartons of milk a week" "Me
too!"), try to find things where their amount is bigger than their
partner’s, or try to make true sentences about their partner.
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