National sports: Cricket

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (National sports mini-series, episode 230) is a short documentary about cricket in the countries of the Commonwealth, told through the story of Don Bradman. It starts in Bowral, a small town in Australia, about a hundred years ago, where a boy with no bat and no friends to play with hit a golf ball with a stump against the bricks under a water tank. It explains what a batsman is, where cricket started and how it travelled across the Commonwealth (fifty-six countries, with millions of children playing in the street in India), then what a batsman's average is: about fifty for the best players, nearly one hundred for Bradman. It ends with his last match, in London in August 1948, where he was out for zero on his second ball, and with the number Australians still know: 99.94. 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: all 10 on facts, one of them on what a batsman is, which the narration explains. The study topic is cricket in the countries of the Commonwealth.

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 boy hitting the golf ball under the water tank, a photo of Don Bradman with his bat in about 1932, a photo of boys playing cricket in a street in Mumbai), 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: Why do you think people love Bradman's story, even with a zero at the end?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read large numbers and a decimal number (99.94). The pack's key words explain the new words (cricket, alone, bat, stump, golf, tank, brick, direction, batsman, average, run, crowd, cheer).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (4e); it serves axis 1 of the 4e programme, "Sport et société" (study topic "Le cricket dans les pays du Commonwealth"). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.