Football divides as well as uniting. At LanguageUK we have festooned our dining room with the flags of all participating nations. But who should we support? There’s also a quiz to see how well you got to know your teachers!
At the time of writing, England, Spain and Italy are all out of the tournament. That’s LanguageUK’s home nation and two of our largest customer groups!
Fortunately, we have students from France and Croatia with us now and a teacher from Colombia (that’s Anna, who works for our sister school, Hablemos).
Students from Ecuador, Mexico and Germany were with us this month and in the next three weeks we will be welcoming visitors from Russia, Switzerland, Brazil (!) and possibly the Netherlands.
We shall also be watching Algeria. We have had students from there and the country’s progress in the competition is keenly followed by our Arabic speakers.
Other possibilities are the countries of previous students: Japan, Korea, Belgium, Greece, Portugal and Iran.
Joanna likes wine from Chile and Argentina. With husband Fran teaching Spanish that brings in Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Honduras.
That only leaves seven countries where at the moment we can’t think of a good reason to support – Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Bosnia & Herzogovina, Nigeria, Ghana, Australia and the USA.
Or can we reduce that even further?
Here’s the Quiz:
1. Which LanguageUK teacher was born in Africa?
2. In which World Cup nation did Sam live?
3. In which World Cup nations has Amanda taught English?
4. One of the teachers studied in a World Cup nation; which teacher and which country?
Post your answers on LanguageUK’s Facebook page or email them to info@languageuk.com. The quiz ends on Tuesday 1 July, so ‘get your skates on’ [hurry up]. We will put the names of everybody who gets the right answer into a hat and pick a winner. There may be a prize!
If you are a ‘footie’ fan, you can combine it with your English studies by visiting ‘Premier Skills’, a collaboration between the British Council and the English Premier League. The website has some fun activities for learning English and one or two articles about the World Cup.
This is a link to the website: PremierSkillsBritishCouncil.org
We also found an interesting (though long) article on AL-Jazeera.com that discusses the linguistic politics of the World Cup. It’s called ‘What language does soccer speak?’