Sporty Stuff to Talk About

Simple, sport-like events can be brought into the ESL classroom to provide a motivating context for prediction, reporting, advising, encouraging, congratulating, expressing abilities and possibilities...and who knows what else.

GENERAL SUGGESTIONS FOR SPORT DESIGN

Make it safe. Obviously, you want to avoid games involving flying pointy objects. But also think twice about games which might inspire sudden, desperate lunges. People can get carried away.

Make it voluntary. Try to design games so that all physical actions are done by volunteers. You never know who might have a hidden injury, a powerful inhibition, etc.

Make it easy enough. But not too easy. If everyone is failing or everyone is succeeding, make adjustments.

Make it suspenseful. Sports where each "play" has some duration to it tend to generate excitement. For example, bowling at a large object all the way across the room is better than bowling a small object a few feet away.

Make it visible. Use large objects and big movements when possible.

Consider giving two tries. It reduces frustration and can also bring in new language. ("Can she do it this time/again?") Giving the second try only if the first try fails speeds things up a bit. The traditional "three tries" tends to bog things down too much, in my experience.

Consider progressive difficulty. Each turn begins with something easy then gets harder and harder. Example: bowling from 4 feet away, then 8 feet away, then 16 feet, etc.

Consider Round Robin format (winner keeps playing). It can make one-on-one games more interesting.

Make discussion pairs (or trios). I needn't tell you that this will produce more practice than student-teacher interaction alone.

Make teams. Individual sports work fine for a quick three to five minute activity, but creating teams increases motivation and can broaden the discourse.

Make teams and pairs. Students can get lost on large teams. Combining teams and pairs can work well, though it's best to give one a chance to get established before creating the other. Example: Make pairs. Get a volunteer. Make predictions within pairs. Have the volunteer bowl. Split the class down the middle, without dividing any pairs, forming two teams. Proceed using pairs within teams. A team captain can help to bring together the ideas from the pairs and make final decisions for the team.

GENERAL SUGGESTIONS FOR LANGUAGE ELICITATION

Prior exposure. Competitive events are probably best used to practice language that has already been encountered and perhaps practiced in more controlled settings (dialogues, cloze, etc.), ideally earlier that week so it's had a chance to sink in. On the other hand, a new student, given a few key phrases, can get by pretty well. In any case, a quick refresher prior to the competition is a good idea.

Warm up with yes/no questions ("Do you think he's gonna do it?", "Yes/Yes, I do") then move to more open questions. ("So what do you think?", "I don't think he's gonna make it.")

Warm up with teacher-to-class interaction then move to teacher-to-individual-student and student-to-student interaction.

If the focus is on prediction, it can work well to give points for correct predictions as well as for success at the game. Example: your team gets one point if your bowler knocks over the target and one point for each time it correctly predicts whether another team's bowler will do so.

Eliciting advice. Advice can be about the physical task ("Maybe you should throw it higher"), but providing strategic alternatives makes advice more motivated. Example: Allow the bowler, with the advice of her teammates, to choose from three different lines (masking tape) from which to bowl--a close one for 1 point, a farther one for 2 points, and the farthest one for 3 points.

Eliciting past narrative. You can, of course, just ask people to describe what has just happened. It might work better, though, if you have one of a pair of partners turn around so he can't see the proceedings. The observing partner can then describe them. Alternatively, use an activity which is by nature small and difficult to see--a coin spinning contest, for example. Invite one of each pair of partners to stand around the table (further obscuring visibility) while the contest proceeds, then have them report back to their score-keeping partners about what happened. [UNTESTED. Perhaps more trouble than it's worth.]

SOME GAME IDEAS

Bowling. Roll a ball at an object from behind a line. A tennis ball and a cereal box work fine. To give options, allow players to bowl from different distances for 1, 2, or 3 points. Or, give a choice of cereal box orientations: lying on its side = 1 point, standing face-on = 2 point, standing edge-on = 4 points.

Basketball. Throw an object into a receptacle. A ping-pong ball or crumpled paper ball and a hat or box work well. To give options, allow a choice of distances or receptacle sizes.

Spin off. Two or three players spin coins on a table by flicking them with their fingers. Longest spinning coin wins. You can complicate things by adding an accuracy dimension: Put a target (masking tape with a dot on it) in the middle of the table. Put starting places (small pieces of masking tape, one for each player) around the edges of the table. One point is given for spinning longest and one point for stopping closest to the target. Presumably good for eliciting comparatives and superlatives. [UNTESTED, except by native speakers.]

Cliffhanger. Players throw or slide an object onto a table or desk, trying to get their object to stop as close to the far edge as possible without falling over. For the "object", I would recommend a piece of paper (from--and to be returned to-- the recycling bin, of course) crumpled or folded by the players into whatever shape they think will work best. Played as an individual sport, measurements could be taken after each throw, but I suspect it would work well as a team sport with, say, five players from one team and five from another. The paper objects could be marked up with colored markers to distinguish those of one team from those of the other. Play would alternate between the two teams, with points being awarded based on the final positions of the objects. Example: 3 points for the object closest to the edge, 2 for the second closest, 1 for the third closest. And yes, you can try to knock the objects of the opposing team off the table. [UNTESTED, except by ESL teachers.]

Baseball. Baseball is such a prolific generator of idioms that I think it deserves a different sort of treatment--a more detailed simulation with focus on learning baseball's particular terminology. I have a few ideas which I'll post here soon.

SOME COMMON UTTERANCES

The following are some bits of language which strike me as both frequent and useful in the context of competitive events. They're loosely bundled into various types of categories, but those categories shouldn't be taken too seriously. There's a lot of overlap, and dialogue-like flow has been given priority over categorization.

Prediction, Probability

Abilities, Opinions

Pre-game interview

Encouragement*

Congratulation

Consolation

For the Disgruntled

Post-game interview

Procedural Stuff

The State of the Game

Advice

Past Narrative

Various Conditionals

Yet More Stuff

* What is or is not a normal thing to say in emotionally charged categories such as "encouragement" and "congratulation" seems to me to be particularly variable over the years and from social group to social group. One way to deal with this is to stick with the basics. ("Awesome!", above, is a bit risky.) Another is to let students teach each other; get input and feedback from the students who happen to be relatively advanced in these areas about what they and their friends would say in these situations.

FURTHER POSSIBILITIES

After playing, have students write down the rules to the game.

Have students generate ideas about how to make the game more interesting.

Have students invent new games given, say, a ping-pong ball and a rubber chicken. Or see if they can come up with classroom safe versions of other professional sports.

Force your native speaking friends to play a game you'd like to use. Observe and/or record them to get ideas about high frequency utterances. Buy them pizza.