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OCR
STUDY ONE 4.5.10 Communicating in English while doing sports Another emerging theme was doing sports and using English as a lingua franca for communication. Victor goes to football training on a regular basis, and since he is part of an international team, English is used as a common ground for communication. He explained it as follows: I have soccer training three times a week, and English is the commonly accepted and used language because there are people from all kinds of minorities and foreigners, so we use [English]. There are more foreigners than Hungarians. They speak English with coaches or teammates as most of the other team members and coaches do not speak Hungarian. He explains: “In the evening when it is dark, we can’t see each other clearly so [we do not recognize who is Hungarian, therefore] we speak to each other in English because everyone speaks and understands English”. This kind of intercultural communication may also result in incidental learning of certain vocabulary items as well as developing learners’ L2 pragmatic competence (Schmidt 1993, 1995, 2001). 4.5.11 Using English at school in classes other than EFL Last but not least, students were asked whether it is useful and beneficial for them at school to consume English language content in their free time. Students explained that, in many cases, the information they gain through the English language might be useful at school both in English and other lessons. Furthermore, Christian explained that during Biology lessons, the teacher often uses English-language videos to make the lesson more interesting. In his words: “For example, in Biology classes, we usually watch scientific videos in English, and they’re easy to understand. I think most of my class has no problem understanding them.” Moreover, Victor’s teacher even encourages students to use the knowledge gained through EE activities. Victor explained: “[F]or example, anything that has to do with what we covered in class, I just write down a synonym in the test and I get extra points for that.” 4.6 CONCLUSION Overall, it may be concluded that participants regularly engage in various EE activities, but in most cases, they do not necessarily do so for language learning purposes. Rather, these EE activities are pursued as if they were average leisure time activities that happen to be English-language activities. Based on + 85 +
