Podcast 36

Jack: Hello my name’s Jack and welcome to this week’s Premier Skills English podcast.

Rich: Hi everyone. I’m Rich and every week we talk about football and help you with your English.

Jack: This week, we’re going to talk about some of the FA Cup matches that happened last weekend. And the language focus is on how you can use words you already know to build your vocabulary.  

Rich: We’ll use a lot of words in the podcast that can be used in different ways. Sometimes a word can be used as a noun and at other times as a verb. So when you’re learning vocabulary, you need to make a note of these different uses.

Jack: In this podcast, we’re going to look at different uses of the words, tie, replay and draw. It’s going to get quite complicated so try to follow the different ways you can use the words. At the end of the podcast, we’re going to suggest a strategy for recording new vocabulary to help you remember.

Rich: And I’m going to make another Premier League prediction. But first, you have another chance to win a Samsung Galaxy tablet in our ‘What’s my Team?’ competition.

Jack: This week, our Premier League fan is Jason. Listen to Jason’s riddle and try to work out: what’s his team?

Jason: This is our best season ever. Just playing against Manchester Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea is a dream come true. I never thought I’d see the day when we played in the Premier League. We’ve got the smallest Premier League stadium. If you come to a match you’ll have a great time afterwards, because you can spend the weekend on a the beach as my town is a traditional holiday resort too!

Rich: We don’t don’t play this team until April. The weather should be nicer and I imagine lots of Liverpool fans will spend the weekend there.

Jack: We’re playing there this weekend. You don’t get too many people sitting on the beach in the UK in February! It’s a bit too cold.

Rich: If you want to enter the competition, you can also read the competition text on the podcast page on the website. I hope this makes it easier for you.

Jack: What was the answer to last week’s riddle Rich?

Rich: Last week, Adam spoke about Manchester City. I think most people worked out the answer when Adam mentioned a few of City’s star players.

Jack: Yes, I think most of you knew that Yaya Toure and Sergio Aguero play for City. We have selected a winner at random from the correct answers and the eighteenth winner of the What’s my team? competition is RuslanJon, a Manchester Utd fan from Uzbekistan. Congratulations RuslanJon! We’ll be in contact with you this week.

Rich: Well done RuslanJon! Last week we asked you if you’d ever enjoyed a match when your team had lost. Most of you, unsurprisingly, had not, but a few of you told us that you had. Sonchina from Armenia said she enjoyed watching Manchester City beat QPR to win their first Premier League title despite being a Manchester Utd fan. Not sure if many Man Utd fans would agree with that one Sonchina!

Jack: Aragorn1986 from Montenegro says that he doesn’t usually enjoy watching his team lose but if it is a really good match with lots of goals then it is possible. He says the point of watching football is to enjoy it.  I think I agree with Aragorn1986 here, but it might depend on how important the match is.

Rich: Thanks for all your comments. We’re really happy to read them and we try to reply to as many of them as we can. If you see someone write an interesting comment then why not reply to them and start a conversation?

Jack: What’s been happening in the Premier League this week, Rich?

Rich: Well, there were no Premier League matches last weekend because most of the teams from the BPL were involved in the FA Cup.

Jack: Good acronyms there, Rich. We looked at these the other week. BPL is, of course, the Barclays Premier League and the FA from FA cup is the Football Association. Were there any shocks or upsets?

Rich: Not really. All the Premier League teams that were playing teams from lower divisions got through to the next round, apart from West Brom, who drew with Peterborough from League One, which is the third level of English football. That match needs a replay.

Jack: I think replays are something special and are not used in many countries. In the FA Cup, when two teams draw after 90 minutes, they play the match again at the other team’s stadium. This match is called a replay. If the replay finishes in a draw they play 30 minutes of extra-time and then there is a penalty shoot-out.

Rich: But this didn’t always happen. In the past, there were no penalty shoot-outs. In 1980 Arsenal and Liverpool played the FA Cup semi-final four times, it needed three replays. Arsenal eventually won but they must have been a bit tired, they lost the final to West Ham.

Jack: The word replay is also used when you are watching a match on television. After a goal is scored the TV station always shows the goal again, sometimes slowly and sometimes at normal speed. These are called action replays or just replays. They are not just used for goals but also important decisions like offsides and fouls to see if the referee made the right decision.

Rich: I think slow motion replays make a referee’s job very difficult these days. The referee or assistant referee only gets to see it once at normal speed.

Jack: Yes, I agree. It must really put a lot of pressure on the referee, knowing that everyone else gets to see the action in slow motion from different angles.

Rich: The word replay has a couple of meanings and can be used as a noun or a verb. Another word that has lots of meanings is the word ‘draw’.

Jack: You said earlier that West Brom drew with Peterborough. So here ‘draw’ means for a match to finish equal - without any team winning. There are quite a lot of other uses of the word ‘draw’, for example, you can draw a picture...

Rich: And in football, the word draw can be used in different ways, too. It can be used as a verb like West Brom drew 1--1 with Peterborough or I think Leicester will draw with Liverpool tonight. It can also be used as a noun, West Brom and Peterborough finished in a 1-1 draw or I think it will be a draw between Leicester and Liverpool.

Jack: Draw has one more meaning in football. Have you seen the draw for the next round of the cup?

Rich: Ah, yes, I saw that Chelsea have drawn Manchester City. That’s a massive cup-tie.

Jack: So, a draw is also an event that happens before a cup competition or each round of a cup competition. All the teams have a ball or a piece of paper and are put into a box or a bowl and someone chooses or draws which teams will play each other.

Rich: Manchester Utd got an away draw to a lower division team. An easy draw for them!

Jack: Arsenal have drawn Hull for the third year in a row. We beat them in the final two years ago.

Rich: And Liverpool have an away tie with Blackburn, but only if they beat West Ham in a replay.

Jack: There are some interesting cup-ties there. A cup-tie is a word that is used to describe a match in a cup competition. We often just say ‘tie’. The Chelsea manager, Guus Hiddink has described the tie against City as a ‘Cup Final.’

Rich: Managers and commentators often describe a big cup-tie as a Cup Final to say that it is really, really important.

Jack: The word ‘tie’ is similar to ‘cup match’, but it can also be used to mean ‘draw’ the word we were looking at earlier. You can say the match between West Brom and Peterborough finished in a tie or it finished in a draw.

Rich: That’s a little complicated.  So, both tie and draw can mean to finish a match with equal scores.  Tie is the same as match and draw can also mean that two teams are going to have a match in the cup.

Jack: Yes, and the draw means the event when teams are picked like in a lottery and placed together.

Rich: And tie can also be used as a verb. Man City and Arsenal are tied for second place in the Premier League table or you might hear a commentator say ‘the scores are tied at 3-3’.

Jack: OK - so as we said at the beginning of today’s podcast, you’ve heard a lot of vocabulary and now, we want to focus on a strategy for learning and revising that vocabulary.

Rich: When you discover a new word the first thing to do is to write it down so you can remember it. But, if you just write words down in a long list you will find it very difficult to remember them. You need to write the words in groups.

Jack: You might want to use a notebook or you might want to use an app. We’ve put some links to some apps we think are useful for recording vocabulary on the side of this page.

Rich: There are lots of different ways you can put words into groups. You need to find the way that works best for you. Here are two ways and we’d like to know which one you prefer.

Jack: So the first way is sometimes called word families which are all the different uses of the same word. For example; if you take the word draw, you could put that at the top of the page and put all the different uses of draw together. So, under the word draw you might put the noun form: the result of a football match, the verb to make a picture and all the other uses we discussed or you discover.

Rich: What I like my students to do is to look at groups of words as teams instead of families. Families all have the same name but players in teams have different names but work together. In a word team we look at words with similar meanings. If we look at the word draw again, this time we would group it with win and lose in word team called ‘match results’. As you add words to your team, you might want to put words that have similar meanings or opposites together. Next to draw you might want to put the word tie.

Jack: So you can record words in families, that is grouped together with other uses of the same word, or in teams, which are grouped together by meaning. In last week’s podcast we had a vote and asked you if you preferred to listen to or read things when you are trying to learn new words. 75% of you said that you prefer to listen to things. That’s great news for us - we like making these podcasts and I hope you learn lots of new words when you listen.

Rich: This week, we want to ask you about how you keep a record of new vocabulary and we suggested two strategies. At the bottom of the page, there is another vote. We want to know if you prefer recording vocabulary in word families, or in word teams or if you have another strategy. If you do, please leave a comment and let us know what works.

Jack: Which brings us to our questions for you this week. Question 1. Which team has your team drawn in the FA Cup?  Are you happy with the draw?

Rich: Question 2. Thinking about word families and teams, what words can you add to a word team called ‘football stadium’?

Jack: Question 3. How do you learn and record new words in English? I know that there’s a vote at the bottom of the page, but we’d really like you to comment and share your experiences of learning and recording vocabulary.

Rich: Before we talk about this week’s prediction I’d like to say sorry to Rafayel from Armenia. Last week I said that nobody had made the correct prediction for the Arsenal - Chelsea match. In fact, Rafayel got the prediction spot on with a 1-0 win for Chelsea. I’ll be more careful when looking through the comments in future.

Jack: There are two full rounds, 20 matches, of Premier League action this week. Which match are you going to make a prediction about, Rich?

Rich: Most of you will be listening after the midweek matches so I’m going to make a prediction about the top of the table clash between Leicester City and Manchester City on Saturday. Leicester are having a brilliant season and many people thought they may have started to fall down the table by now. But they are still at the top and still surprising most people. Manchester City are playing well and have scored 13 goals in their last 4 matches. This is a difficult match for Leicester and will be a big test of their chances of winning the title. Final score: Manchester City 2-0 Leicester City

Jack: I’m going to go for a draw. Right, anyway that’s it for today - we’ve run out of time! Thanks for listening. And don’t forget to write your answers to the competition, our questions, your predictions and anything you want to say about the website or football English in the comments below.

Rich: Don’t forget if you sign in, you can score points to see if you can get your club, your country and your name to the top of our leaderboard.

Jack:  Bye for now and enjoy your football!