Article: How the FIFA World Cup™ can inform English Language teaching
[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 18 | July 21, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]
The Cambridge English blog has published an article on FIFA World Cup’s influence on ELT.
The 2014 FIFA World Cup™ has had everything – great goals, classic matches, drama, controversy and even a linguistic study from the team here at Cambridge University Press.
We used the World Cup to showcase the power of the Cambridge English Corpus, a multi-billion-word database of written and spoken English language taken from a huge range of media sources. Throughout the tournament, our language research team analysed this database to discover the media’s sentiment towards the competition and participating countries.
The less said about the words associated with England (‘exciting’, ‘disappointing’, ‘inexperienced’) the better, but with the curtain coming down on proceedings over the weekend, it comes as no surprise the ‘powerful’, ‘focussed’ and ‘committed’ Germans ended up victorious in their pursuit of a fourth World Cup title, defeating the Argentinians who played with ‘confidence’ and ‘flair’ but were often seen as ‘unconvincing’ on their way to the final.
Speaking about the study, Dr Claire Dembry from our language research team said, ‘The breadth of sources we’ve analysed over the course of the tournament means we’re able to give a unique insight into the mood surrounding each team. Examining the Cambridge English Corpus and seeing how the media portray the various competing nations has given us an interesting insight into how national identity and stereotypes have been played out in the media.
