The Role of Popular Culture in Primary English

Section 5: Sports

Many children are interested in sports, even if they are unable to participate in sports and physical activities themselves. Popular interests include football, running, swimming, tennis, wrestling and boxing. This interest can be drawn upon in the classroom in a number of ways, including:

• Writing a review of a specific game/ event for a class newspaper/ magazine or blog
• Writing a description of a particular sport and a list of rules of the game
• Researching and developing biographies of famous sports men and women
• Writing a short history of a particular sport.

One way of approaching this area with student teachers is by asking them to read a paper on this subject written by an American researcher, Anne Haas Dyson. She describes how children’s passion for American sport spilled over to classroom literacy tasks and motivated them to write:

• DYSON, A.H. (1999) Coach Bombay’s kids learn to write: Children’s appropriation of media material for school literacy, Research in the Teaching of English, 33, 367-402.

Student teachers could then be asked to consider the following statements in groups and state whether they agreed or disagreed with them:

• Literacy activities based on sport would exclude those children who are not very interested in sport.
• Sport is a useful tool to promote literacy because it is a central element in everyday life.
• The difficulty with utilising sport in the literacy curriculum is that is reinforces gender divides: boys and girls generally like very different sports.
• Focusing on sports in literacy can encourage competitiveness in the classroom.
• Sport is a useful source of material for the literacy curriculum because it incorporates different genres – reports, lists, biographies.
• Work on sports has the potential to motivate boys who might otherwise not be interested in reading and writing.