Ball ball ball, footie footie footie! I’m a bit obsessed with the beautiful game, and I’ve taught plenty of students who are too! You may have come across Premier Skills English before, the British Council/Premier League site dedicated to teaching English through football. It’s full of great resources, really well-designed and well worth a visit. Premier Skills would be my first port of call for footie related ELT material, but Languagecaster.com is a new favourite of mine!
Languagecaster was put together by a couple of teachers/football fans with the goal of helping students learn English through something they enjoy. According to the site, these guys have been running the site since 2006 and they’ve done a brilliant job. They upload regular podcasts, provide forums for footie related discussion and offer some great explanations of football vocabulary. There’s an extensive glossary on the site full of expressions, technical terms and clichés – that alone is a great ‘football dictionary’ for learners.
What I really, really like about the site is you can tell how much effort these guys have put in to sharing their passion with their students. The archives show that their podcasts used to be accompanied by worksheets, which I imagine became a bit time consuming to make! The podcasts are fantastic listening resources and well recorded. The natural language used would be great for work on connected speech in addition to addressing the football-related content. There are other interactive features on the site (like weekly score predictions) which give students a reason to visit regularly and engage with new content.
If you’ve got learners who are really keen on football then I recommend sharing this site with them. The only downside I can see is that one of the writers is a Spurs fan…
Subscribe to the Languagecaster podcast here
Incidentally, here are a few posts I’ve written over the last few years related to footie. I think some of the recordings were just examples rather than things to use in class, but you might find something useful.
Lesson ideas: football and conditionals
Using sports commentaries in class
Categories: General, Lesson Ideas, other, reviews
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