English · Chapter 28
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Sports is one of the Language Development units of the NEB Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is competitive sport as a shared human experience, and it uses a reading text on the Euro 2020 football championship to develop reading comprehension, topic vocabulary, grammar and writing. Around the text the unit offers pre-reading discussion, comprehension exercises, vocabulary practice, a grammar focus, listening and speaking work, and a writing task connected to sport. The aim is not to test sporting knowledge. A familiar and exciting topic is used so that students read closely, infer meaning, use vocabulary accurately and write about real events in clear, organised English.
The reading passage of this unit is about Euro 2020, the sixteenth UEFA European Football Championship. The unit treats the tournament as a story of celebration, difficulty and recovery, and the facts a student needs about the competition are these.
Although the tournament carried the name 2020, it was actually played from 11 June to 11 July 2021, because the COVID-19 pandemic forced a one-year postponement. This is a useful point for the classroom, since it shows how large events are named, dated and reported even when circumstances change.
Euro 2020 was an unusual tournament in its organisation. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the competition, UEFA did not give it to a single host nation. The matches were spread across eleven cities in eleven different countries, and the semi-finals and the final were played at Wembley Stadium in London. Twenty-four national teams took part, and because of pandemic restrictions many matches were played before limited crowds. For millions of supporters the return of fans to stadiums after long lockdowns was itself a moment of joy.
The competition produced memorable drama. Italy, who had missed the 2018 World Cup, arrived on a long unbeaten run under coach Roberto Mancini and played attractive attacking football. England reached their first final in a major men's tournament since 1966. The final at Wembley on 11 July 2021 finished 1-1 after extra time, with Luke Shaw scoring early for England and Leonardo Bonucci equalising for Italy, and Italy won the penalty shoot-out 3-2 to lift their second European title. Goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma was named player of the tournament, and Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal finished as the top scorer.
The tournament also had a human side. Denmark's midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch during his team's opening match and was revived by medical staff, and his recovery, followed by Denmark's brave run to the semi-finals, was widely seen as the emotional heart of the competition.
The main ideas that the unit draws from this theme are: sport as a celebration that gives people a shared identity; resilience in the face of a pandemic, injury and past failure; the mixture of joy and disappointment that a big tournament creates; and the way a sporting event is reported through dates, venues, scores and personal stories. In the exam a student should be able to locate specific information, infer the attitudes of players and fans, and explain what the tournament meant to the people who lived through it.