Sport for everyone: The Paralympics

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Sport for everyone mini-series, episode 64) is a short documentary about the games that became the Paralympics. On 29 July 1948, the day the Olympic Games opened in London, sixteen wheelchair users, fourteen men and two women, held an archery competition on the lawn of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in the south of England. The doctor behind the games, Ludwig Guttmann, was Jewish and had left Nazi Germany for Britain in 1939; in 1944 he opened a centre at the hospital for people with spinal injuries, many of them soldiers hurt in the Second World War. Doctors then thought these patients would stay in bed and die soon; Guttmann wanted them to get up, use wheelchairs and play sport. The games grew every year, and in 1960 they went to Rome, with four hundred athletes from twenty-three countries: today these are called the first Paralympic Games. Para means "next to", and in Paris in 2024 about 4,400 athletes came from more than 160 countries. The narration is in the past simple, with the present simple for today; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (archery and para). The study topic is sport for everyone: who gets to play, then and now.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (a drawing of the archers in wheelchairs on the lawn in 1948, a photo of the young Ludwig Guttmann, a photo of two archers in wheelchairs at the Rome games in 1960), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Would you like to watch the Paralympics? Which sport would you choose?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates and large numbers. The pack's key words explain the new words (lawn, wheelchair, injury, spine, soldier, organise, competition, archery, arrow, bow, target, athlete).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.