The following article by Lindsay Clandfield is taken from the MacMillan Education on-line teaching resource site.

Tournament not torment

The finals of the Euro 2008 football championship will be played soon. Who will win? Do you care?

Even if you don't, major sporting events like this tend to muscle their way into class. I treied letting my students just talk about it one year. Hopeless. Not only did they argue about who was best, which team woudl win, unfair referee calls, etc - they did it all in their own language nad not in English. Those who, like me, weren't that bothered started doing other things.

There are perhaps more productive ways of harnessing this interest, though. Official tournament web-sites are one interesting avenue. You could organise a simple 'webquest' by preparing a series of questions beforehand. These could be about the history of the tournament or of the host city or country.

You can also use a major sports tournament to explore vocabulary. How many different ways can you say "win" or "beat"? A visit to the Euro 2008 web-site yielded the following: prevailed, were crowned champions, overcame, triumphed, sealed their success, vanquished and were given victory.

Or how about a student-produced quiz? Continuing the Euro 2008 theme, divide the class into groups and assign each a group from the tournament. They have to make one football-related question for each team in their group. Those students who aren't interested in football can make up general knowledge questions about the countries involved (you could always write some of the questions yourself beforehand, to help get them started).

Once you have your equestions the students are ready to test each other. Get into the spirit of the event, with knockout rounds, extra questions for penalties and so on. I've even used red and yellow cards to penalise students for not using English.

I'm not a big sports fan but many of my students are. During these trying times of football championships and approaching Olympics, my basic philosophy is: if you can't beat them, join them.