The World Cup in the classroom.

Girls, what I want to do here is share an experience with you. Well, as you all know, the World Cup has become the talk of the country. And, the classroom does not escape from reality. Younger students are always exchanging stamps to complete their albums. Elder students are always judging the Argentinian coach’s decisions and criticising the players. So, I thought: why not taking advantage of this situation? I have to ask them to stop talking about the topic. Why not spending a whole lesson talking about the World cup using the target language? And that was what I did. I used the World Cup as context for a group of activities related to countries and nationalities with little students and, I presented a text about the World Cup for reading comprehension to the elder ones. And let me tell you that the results were amazing. They were so motivated that they really enjoyed the class and were eager to participate or to find out more about the World Cup history for example.
Motivation plays an important role in this issue. As we all have studied motivated students are more willing to participate and take risks, and are so interested in communicating that they manage to express themselves in the target language.
So girls I think that it is important to take these things into account, I know that sometimes we have to follow a book, we have many restrictions but we cannot deny reality. What is happening outside the classroom is of interest to the students. Almost any topic can be used as context to practise any grammar structure. If not texts can be found. For example, I will include at the end a link of a website where you can find texts about the World Cup for different levels. So, if you want them to pay attention to you just pay attention to their interests...

http://www.saberingles.com.ar/reading/index.html