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Playing football while learning German: the concept is called Double Club. A visit with the enthusiastic players at Langley Park School for Girls near London. By Barbara Klimke

Bethany Price curves around one player, then another. Her ponytail sways, the ball flies into the net. The pupil in the gym at the Langley Park School for Girls near London manages a formidable solo run and effortless dribbling. It would appear to be a normal English sport lesson if the hall weren’t echoing with such unaccustomed vocabulary. “Wunderbar,” the coach calls in German. “Gut gemacht.” – “Umdrehen.” – “Alles noch mal von vorn!” Bethany Price smiles. “Combining football and German,” she remarks, “that’s pretty bizarre.”

Without a doubt it is an unorthodox idea to link two subjects in class that have nothing whatsoever in common. Yet that is exactly what makes it so compelling for Bethany Price and her classmate Saranka Viththiyakaran. Once a week, sixteen girls, all 13 and 14 years old, voluntarily stay at school longer for the course Foreign Languages and Football. They have to sit in the classroom for the first part of the extra lesson and learn terms like Fußballstutzen and Flügelstürmer. Only then are they allowed time with the ball.

First half: German lesson

This double lesson concept that was developed by the Goethe-Institut London together with the professional English club FC Arsenal and the educational organization UK-German Connection is called Double Club. The basic rule is as simple as a football match: Each unit lasts 90 minutes and is divided up into two halves. The first 45 minutes are dedicated to vocabulary work and grammar. During the second half what’s been learned is applied on the field or in the gym and it’s no longer the German teacher, but a football coach from Arsenal standing on the sideline. The course is designed to supplement school lessons and lasts eight weeks. It ends with a day at the stadium of the premier league FC Arsenal.

Click on the screenshot to go to the website “Sport and German: Women’s Football 2011” with detailed portraits of all participating countries!

The project has been running since 2005 in England in co-ed classes. It has been so successful that it received the European Award for Languages. Now, for this year’s football Women’s World Cup from 26 June until 17 July in Germany the Goethe-Institut has drawn up a learning scheme especially for girls. The first field experiment is taking place in the London suburb of Beckenham, at Langley Park School for Girls. “Since football is hugely popular in England – also to a great extent among girls – it is a wonderful means of directing attention to a language,” says Sabine Hentzsch, director of the Goethe-Institut in London.

Not only were the girls at Langley Park School highly taken with the idea, it also met with the approval of the island’s highest authority in women’s football, the Arsenal Ladies. The team, twelve-time champion in England, promised its support for the Double Club for Girls. “It’s not surprising that the girls are enthusiastic,” observes Kim Little, Arsenal’s 20-year-old goalkeeper, while leafing through the teaching materials for the first time. It contains interviews with players from the German Champions League winners Turbine Potsdam. Kim Little took German at school, but dropped it at the first opportunity; back then she was more interested in sport. “If this had existed back then,” she says, “I sure would have kept up with it.”

Self-confidence through football

What fascinates Faye White (32), captain of the Arsenal Ladies and the English national team, about the Double Club is that it works both ways. It not only increases foreign language skills. “Playing football also promotes the girls’ self-awareness, social skills and self-confidence.” And self-confidence, she suspects, is what some pupils need when they attempt to express themselves in a foreign language that they still make mistakes in. Yet, all too often top athletes think that compared with mastering the ball, mastering a foreign language is unimportant. During international journeys, players are usually surrounded by a staff of professionals that takes care of everything, if necessary, from booking the flights to ordering breakfast.

Goalkeeper Emma Byrne, who grew up in Ireland, first recognized the importance of foreign languages when she was playing for Fortuna Hjørring at the start of her career in Denmark. “The team spoke Danish, the team meetings were held in Danish, the directions were in Danish. I couldn’t understand a word.” Her teammates had to translate every sentence into English for her. She only lasted in Hjørring for six months, then returned to Ireland. When she changed to Arsenal, where she could speak English, she realized why she had suffered in Denmark. It wasn’t homesickness, but the helpless feeling of not understanding anything and feeling no one could understand her. “Today,” Emma Byrne says, “I would always learn the language before switching to a foreign team.”

It’s no coincidence that the model for the Double Club was originally invented at FC Arsenal. The top league men’s team is famous for its international squad. And, with its polyglot coach, Arsène Wenger, it possesses “a living example for multilingualism,” as Sabine Hentzsch from the London Goethe-Institut says. The club traditionally uses his resources and his renown for charitable work in the stadium’s neighbourhood in the north of London. In 1998, after the dual victory in the championship and the cup, Arsenal founded a programme to help disadvantaged youths: the Double Club. At first reading and arithmetic courses were combined using the two-half principle. They were based on the simple fact that even children who are overextended at school want to be able to understand stadium flyers and football statistics. This educational concept was later transferred to other subjects such as civics.

The ball was part of the game and it didn’t take long until it rolled to the Goethe-Institut. With a coach who is convinced that multilingualism increases vocational opportunities, it was clear that FC Arsenal wanted to add foreign languages to its social educational programme. “Learning languages allowed me to get where I wanted to go: to English football,” explains Arsène Wenger. The Double Club for German was launched because of the upcoming World Cup in Germany in 2006. German national keeper Jens Lehmann’s willingness to help develop the project was decisive for its success; he was then under contract with Arsenal. From then on, according to Karl Pfeiffer, responsible for educational cooperation at the London Goethe-Institut, the ball kept rolling. Get the ball rolling is also the name of the anthem that the Goethe-Institut commissioned for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Europe-wide model for success

Since then, Arsenal has provided its football trainers and hired its own foreign languages coordinator, Julie Stoker, who maintains contacts with partner schools. The Goethe-Institut produces the teaching materials and the UK-German Connection maintains the web portal. “Our cooperation is based on the classical partnership that is the basis of much of our activities,” explains Sabine Hentzsch. The model became so successful that the cultural institutes of France, Spain, Portugal and Italy also developed Double Clubs. Again, the ball was kept rolling: the project became multilingual, attracted the interest of the European authorities and the London Goethe-Institut played give-and-go with the EU. School journeys to Brussels and Berlin were financed with EU funds and the Bundesliga club Hertha BSC got involved in the project. In the meantime other professional clubs in England, including Chelsea, copied the Double Club model and tailored it to their club structures. And now it’s time for the girls to keep the ball rolling.

“The girls are probably even more attentive and dedicated than the boys. They pick up the words during training and use them easily in class,” observes Fraser Davis, who runs the Double Club at the Langley Park School. The German teacher, who studied and taught for two years in Potsdam, considers it a cheery, creative access to lessons. It especially helps to motivate the pupils when they have to decide on their foreign language exam subject. Langley Park, a girls’ comprehensive school concentrating on languages and sport, is an ideal partner for the Goethe-Institut’s project. It is one of the few state schools in England where learning a foreign language is mandatory until the age of 16. All of the pupils do their GCSE in German, French or Spanish and even nutrition is taught in a foreign language – a first in Britain. This is particularly remarkable since the British Labour government did away with obligatory foreign languages for pupils over 14 in 2004. Since then the number of schools offering foreign languages until the GCSE dropped dramatically; a trend that the new government coalition plans to put a stop to.

This summer, a Double Club group will travel to Germany for the Women’s World Cup, which may expand the pupils’ vocabulary with words like Nationaltrikot, Würstchenbude and Feuerwerk. And for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London Karl Pfeiffer, the educational coordinator at the London Goethe-Institut, is already putting together the next Double Club project.

The article is from the Goethe-Institut’s magazine on “Women” (PDF). On request, we are happy to send you a printed copy of the magazine. Just send an email with your address to heise@goethe.de.