Football frenzy!

Manaswini Sridhar

Well, it’s been the football season (also called soccer), and football enthusiasts from around the globe have spent either the late hours of the evening or the wee hours of the morning glued to the television, excited, frustrated, cheering, and booing. Even those of us who are not complete football addicts, have been more or less bowled over by the precise kicks and passes, thereby pushing us to become more acquainted with football vocabulary. So let’s look at how we can familiarize and enrich the sports vocabulary of our students so that they are more confident and professional when talking about the football game.

The Internet has a wide array of worksheets that deal with football comprehension and football vocabulary. http://www.elcivics.com/worksheets/football-fans.pdf is a simple and elementary read aloud activity that introduces students to the world of football, and more specifically to the world of football fans. This is suitable for primary school students; it can also be used as a comprehension worksheet for students to answer the routine true or false statements and the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions. Students can also use the text as a guide to write a similar essay on cricket or any other sport that they are acquainted with or play.

The following website focuses on more advanced football vocabulary suitable for middle school students: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/vocabulary/football.shtml.

Students here learn the precise football terms and also learn football conversational phrases to help bring the game to life. The site also has interesting interactive quizzes to test the students’ football vocabulary knowledge after having waded through the definitions and explanations. The explanations are clear, and the quizzes can be done by students with little or no monitoring.

So how does one tweak the material to convert it into a testing material?

Task
If it is a listening activity that you are looking at, you could read out an extract from the following website: http://worldsoccer.about.com/od/soccer101/a/Soccer101_Refs.htm. Given below is the extract; the words in bold are the answers to the task that students will be doing.

Professional soccer games are run by four officials, usually dressed in black or some bright color designed to clash with the jerseys of both teams. Each has a separate but important function during the match and they are all in constant communication with each other in certain leagues thanks to the recent introduction of microphones and earpieces.

In the event of a foul, the referee can blow his whistle to award a free kick – or a penalty kick if it happens to occur inside the penalty area – and penalize the player who committed it. A referee’s first recourse is usually a stern verbal warning.

Students do not get a script of the text. They listen carefully the first time. The second time, they are given instructions to listen again as the teacher reads slowly. Then students note down every word associated with football. The listening test checks both the listening and the spelling skills of the students. Depending on the level of the class, teachers may or may not reveal to students the number of words that they need to cull out from the text.

For those teachers who find that the class is interested in the subject and therefore extra retention exercises can be done without undue protest, here is a dictation/vocabulary test that can be done by the class in a different and more competitive way!

Task

Divide the class into two teams, Team A and Team B. Give each team a list of words from the website earlier mentioned: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/vocabulary/football.shtml.

Each team gets a unique word list. The number of words in the list is determined by the number of players in the team. This list is not to be shown to the other team. The game is noisy; it involves not only coordination within the team, but also attentiveness on the part of the rival team. So it is a lesson in cooperative learning, which if mastered, is in the interests of both the teacher and the students. The idea behind the game is to help students absorb the spelling and the vocabulary.

The teams look at their word list and decide the order in which they will write the words on the board. They also need to determine the order in which they will call out the words written on the blackboard. Team A writes its list of words on the board. Team B may be asked to go out of the classroom or else turn their backs to the board during the process. Team B now lines up just in front of the board, each member with a piece of chalk in his/her hand. A member of Team A times the number of minutes/seconds it takes Team B to complete the task. As the words in the list are called out in random order, the players of Team B (without jostling or pushing the other/others), go quickly to the board and circle the word that is called out and also number it. Thus, the correctness of the individual within the group also determines the success of the team! When the task is completed, Team A announces the time it took Team B to complete the task. Team A also determines whether the answers have been circled and numbered correctly. The teacher, who has been a silent spectator during the activity, awards or deducts marks for coordination within the team, or lack of it!

The activity is now reversed, and after Team A too plays the game, the wining team is announced! If the aim of the learning is to not only learn the spelling, but also to understand and enrich the student vocabulary, a similar game can be played in class using the two teams. But here, instead of calling out the word, each team calls out the meaning of a word on the board, and the other team members have to spot it, circle it, and number it. The two teams will have had to study the words as homework since they are not permitted to look into the dictionary and call out the meanings. The slight pressure and pleasure of winning, combined with the fact that it is team effort, will spur students on to do this homework since otherwise they will get jeered and booed by their own team members!

Task

Give Team A 15 words. Give the team 10 minutes to go through the words and discuss the meanings quietly. While Team B goes out, Team A writes the words on the board in random order. Team B lines up as before, and a member of Team A calls out the definition/clue of the words in the list and the players of Team B circle the definition and number it.

An example has been given below, with the answers in the brackets.

Clues called out by students:
1. Like the umpire in cricket (3)
2. Yellow card shown to a player for playing foul (6)
3. Name of a shot for a ball kicked with the heel (10)
4. Also called a forward (7)
5. Also referred to as stoppage time (8)
6. Name of the kick as players move the ball from one to another (9)
7. Kicking a moving ball when it is still in the air and before it hits the ground (5)
8. A technique whereby a player passes the ball through the opponent’s leg and collects it from the other side (1)
9. What starts the game (4)
10. Something a team wants to give to other teams! (2)

Words written on the board:
1. nutmeg
2. a knock out
3. referee
4. kick-off
5. volley
6. booking
7. attacker
8. injury time
9. pass
10. backheel

The teams will vie with one another to ensure their own team is not knocked out! The teacher’s role as a moderator gives her/him the time to understand which students need more help and motivation.

Each team could be asked to get together to write a story, a commentary, or a conversation using all the words in their list. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking…all these activities are combined in one exercise.

The author is a teacher educator and language trainer based in Hyderabad. She can be reached at manaswinisridhar@gmail.com.