The Portuguese connection

For many teachers, Euro 2004 is a major distraction. Others, however, are using the competition as a springboard to some very effective learning

You might think that teachers would have difficulty competing for their students’ attention, but actually an event of such interest offers great learning opportunities. And it can act as a dress rehearsal for an even greater sports event coming a bit later this year: the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

Geography and cultural tie-ins are obvious. Here, interest in football is not a prerequisite. Use the excellent web site http://www.portugalinsite.com to plan a trip to Portugal, for example. For students with little interest in the competition, let them plan interesting short excursions while their football-crazy friends are at the stadium watching the match. They can be responsible for the dinner menu as well – the portugalinsite has an extensive section on Portuguese cuisine.

Weather can have a huge effect on a football match. Ten-day forecasts are available at http://www.weather.com for dozens of Portuguese cities, including all the Euro 2004 venues. Just go to the weather.com site, click on “world” and then type in Portugal in the search box. Students can also learn a lot from the animated satellite map. At this time of year, for example, the weather in Portugal seems to be more similar to that of North Africa than of the more northerly regions of Europe.

Every day, Euro 2004 is generating lots of statistics. Students can make use of them at almost any level of difficulty – looking at the highest winning score, the highest winning margin, calculating averages for goals scored on a daily basis and observing any changes or keeping a goal scoring average on a cumulative basis. Are any of these numbers statistically significant? That is a question for more advanced students.

Moving outside Portugal, there is the rest of Europe to keep students occupied. Politically and economically this region has changed dramatically in the past decade and more changes are afoot in coming years. Many of these changes are reflected in the countries that qualified for Euro 2004, a fact noted in a learning post quiz last week (http://www.bangkokpost.net/education/site2004/injn1504.htm).

Some innovative teachers are having their students “adopt” one of the countries represented in the competition, finding as much out about them as they can and then comparing notes with their friends. Anything is possible. Want to hear the national anthem of Latvia? Try http://www.thenationalanthems.com/.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for some good pre-prepared educational materials on Euro 2004, try the football in schools section of the web site for the English Football Association http://www.thefa.com/grassroots/footballinschools. There, you will find some very nice worksheets at both the primary and secondary levels.

Certainly one of the most impressive Euro 2004-related projects locally is that run by the British Council. It is part of a larger learning through sport programme called “Dreams and Teams” which is being developed in cooperation with the Ministry of Education. Football is a key part of the programme and the Council has set up a special website with a wide variety of features for both teachers and students (http://www.footballculture.britishcouncil.or.th/ ).

A Euro-2004-based activity that is sure to be a big success is the fantasy football competition. This year students from nine Thai schools are going head-to-head with their peers at nine UK schools. Each school has registered one team to play in the Euro 2004 Fantasy football League with a class of students acting as Fantasy ‘managers’.

Using information from the football culture which links directly to the Euro 2004 Fantasy Football website and the Official UEFA Euro 2004 website, the student managers have initially selected a squad of 12 players to play for their team. No more than three of these players can come from any single national side.

This is actually a complicated exercise because each national team in the completion has a squad of 23 players. Thus, the students need to choose players with the best chance of actually playing. If a player doesn’t play in a match, he can’t score any points. To keep the Fantasy League in operation throughout the competition, the teams will be reselected before the quarter-finals, the semi-final and the finals.

During the first stage of the competition, the Thai schools have been holding their own against their UK counterparts. Songkhla’s Woranari Chaloem school has been especially impressive, actually holding down second place in the table as of mid-week last week. You can check the latest standings at http://www.virtualaccesscentre.com/fantasyfootball/.

Student communication is also encouraged, according to David Mathias, the British Council’s ICT coordinator. “Students can interact on a daily basis through forums, and polls. The beauty of this project is that the communication is spontaneous as it is ‘real life’. The content of the site will change throughout the tournament as I add more learning resources, change polls and invite students to participate.”

All communication is closely monitored, Mathias says. “Teachers are reassured that non site members cannot interact with the site and signing up of students is done strictly by the moderator.”

Mathias adds they are seriously considering setting up a fantasy football league based on the English Premiership this coming autumn. “If that goes ahead, we will develop online collaborative activities to enhance students’ learning experiences through sport and the wider curriculum”.

Teacher support is also an important element of the Dreams and Teams programme, Mathias says. “We are also working with the UK schools involved in our Dreams and Teams project to produce a significant bank of educational resource materials for learning through sport in English, mathematics, science and a number of other core curriculum subjects that will made available for Thai teachers in the coming year.

For a detailed student-centred lesson plan from the British Council based on Euro 2004, look at last week’s issue of the learning post for the “The learner’s centre” (http://www.bangkokpost.net/education/site2004/lcjn1504.htm)

While it is possible to link major sporting events like Euro 2004 to almost any subject area in the local curriculum, one of the most obvious link is with the English langauge. The Bangkok Post is covering the story almost as fully as any Thai-language newspaper and even weaker students can benefit because of the background they bring from Thai media accounts of the action.

This can also serve as an excellent introduction to the sports section. It is here that many of the restraints in standard news writing are loosened, and the result is easily some of the most colourful and emotional copy in whole the paper – ecstasy mixed with despair, gushing praise for heroic winners and biting criticism for inept losers.

The results of top-level football matches are notoriously unpredictable, but the coverage itself follows very clear patterns. In the weeks before the competition, there are profiles of the competing teams and their top players. Then, when the things get underway, there are daily previews of coming matches and, of course, extensive coverage of the matches just concluded.

The previews focus on the strategies opposing coaches are likely to employ, the status of key players – especially if they are fighting injuries – and interesting side stories like the intimate knowledge many French and English players have of each other through the English Premiership.

Nothing, however, can top the post-game coverage for intensity. Superlatives abound, both positive and negative.

“Zinedine Zidane proved once again why his is regarded as the finest footballer on the planet by firing France to a last-gasp victory over England,” began the AFP recap of last week’s memorable match.

On the other extreme, AP chastised the host country team for its dismal performance against unfancied Greece. “Portugal, which has a team packed with world class players, was in chaos and disarray. Its midfield was clueless and its forwards were too tame.”

Such coverage gives students a terrific opportunity to increase their vocabulary within a manageable topic area. Take, for example, how sportwriters describe the performances of teams and players.

Teachers might begin with a list of adjectives that students are likely to know, words like excellent, exciting, powerful, brave, clever, surprising, careful, acceptable, average, dull, lazy, poor and terrible. Then, each day, students can look through the newspaper coverage to find more interesting and descriptive words to replace them.

The list will be a long one. Within the first three days of the competition, students skimming through post-match reports in the sports pages of the Bangkok Post could have found triumphant, majestic, miraculous, stellar, superb, exhilarating, aggressive, gutsy, determined, inspired, stunning, astonishing, cautious, flat, sluggish, humiliating, wretched and disastrous. Of course, I may have missed some.

Stories detailing the reactions to a victory or defeat are equally fruitful vocabulary builders. How many ways can you say “unhappy”? Try dejected, distraught, devastated, crestfallen, inconsolable, gutted, downcast or forlorn – and that’s just from the reaction to England’s “heartbreaking” loss to France.

Bangkok Post readers, too, are getting their say in “Sports Bag”, a column normally published on Sunday, which is being featured daily during the Euro competition. The reader contributions are short and they make entertaining reading for students. England fans, for example, can easily commiserate with Tom Collins who shared his feelings from Pattaya:

“I still can’t believe it. What happened? How did England mess that up? I couldn’t even get to sleep afterwards thinking about it. They had the match under control and then they blew it. It’s like a bad dream.

“Why did Emile Heskey give away that stupid foul? Why did Steven Gerrard make that awful back-pass? Why am I an England supporter?”

For more knowledgable and considered analysis, interested students can try sport writer’s daily Wanchai Rujawangsanit “Extra Time” column. Wanchai consistently provides perceptive commentary on the matches of most interest to local fans.

There are numerous other reading activities teachers can employ. Students, for example, can collect descriptions of memorable goals, mentally comparing them with the televised coverage they have already seen. Or they can compare pre-match analysis with post-match reports. They will often find that expert analysis is not so expert after all.

Significantly, these are activities where boys can excel, which is often not the case in the typical language class in this country. But since there is so-much human interest coverage, even girls with zero enthusiasm for football can be active participants.

During the competition, the learning post is going out of its way to help teachers take full advantage of our newspaper coverage. Inside today’s issue, for example, we have two Euro-2004 related activities. Also, today’s edition of our Bangkok Post teachers’ notes on our web site will focus largely on the stories in today’s sports section. The same will be true next week.

For language teachers Here is an example of a language learning activity that teachers might use with their classes throughout the duration of the competition Building your vocabulary during Euro 2004 You can use the Bangkok Post to build your vocabulary during the football competition currently underway in Portugal. It is both easy and fun to do. This activity will get you started. Simply look through the sports pages each day and add appropriate vocabulary to the list. Football players may be described as agile, muscular, erratic .... Team or player performances may be described as awesome, lacklustre, woeful ..... There are many words to describe a player’s or team’s attitude or character, including aggressive, determined, feisty... When their favourite team wins, fans may be described as ecstatic, elated, jubilant... Such fans may be full of joy, euphoria, elation .... When their favourite team loses, fans may be described as devastated, distraught, forlorn... Such fans may be filled with despair, gloom, misery ....