LANGUAGE IN INDIA

The Quintessence of Sports Psychology and Language

A. Kaleb Rajan, Ph.D.

Introduction

Sports Performance has dramatically progressed over the past few decades. Performance levels that are unimaginable and unmatchable in earlier days are now common and the number of athletes capable of outstanding results is on the rise.

Along with the increase in the performance levels, interest in sports and games, especially at the spectator level, has gone beyond one's imagination in India and South Asia. Spectators around the country zealously display their loyalty to their own teams through the use of appropriate slogans, choice lexicon and gestures, etc.

The Focus of This Paper

In this paper, I discuss the use of language in spectator sports and point out how language and nonverbal acts help the growth of solidarity among the members of the teams as well as their admirers. I also discuss the psychology of sports and sportspersons, and describe how psychology works in the sports field and training.

War Metaphors

War metaphors have become very common in sports. Win, defeat, battle field, kings, super kings, warriors, swords, strategy, war cries, etc. are easily noticed. Regional royalty, throne, crown, wraps around the hip, shoulder decorations, etc. are part of the communication process.

Life Is Compared with Sports Events

That players are compared with training in military is declared in many classical texts in Tamil and Sanskrit. There are many verses in the Bible that compare living to running race (1 Corinthians 9:24, Galatians 2:2, 5:7, 2 Timothy 4:7 and Hebrews 12:1). As individual achievements in the arena became a dominant spectator sport in Rome, scholars and theologians of eminence seized the opportunity to compare the need for discipline in ordinary life and relate success in ordinary to the kind of discipline needed to win in sports. This trend is noticed in all cultures.

Ray Ratto of San Francisco Chronicle writes, "…, TV, radio and newspaper people have come to accept and repeat those descriptions as a way to bring the athlete's mind-set and speech patterns to a general audience. And before you know it, it made perfect sense to say, "They're in the war room trying to figure out whether to trade up or stay where they are and take the linebacker." (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/16/SP13378.DTL).

In any case, there is a long tradition of looking at sports preparation and performance from various angles. While gambling is denounced in all Indian didactic literature, I have not come across any reference against clean sports preparation and performance. In the past, participation in war as a soldier was viewed as something very worthwhile. Consider the PuranaaRu poem in ancient Tamil literature, where a mother declares that she does not know where her grown up son is, but she knows for sure that he will appear in the battle field. The interchange between war terms and terms from sports appear to go along well without any objection, because of demands on training and discipline and, of course, strict obedience to authority.

Sports Terms and Learning in the Classroom

As students are into sports in large numbers, terms of sports enter the classroom in some victorious manner. Girish Sheshamani writes,

It is unarguably the most rewarding and excellent method to get your students involved. Down here, Cricket is a passion across all age groups. I make it a point to play recorded commentaries and ask the students to concentrate on the words. Once I finish playing the audio for ten minutes, I put it on pause and ask them for a feedback. Without exception I find the entire group being able to recollect and understand whatever was commentated. Here I am talking about students who have no grounding in the English Language.

The beauty of commentary lies in the fact that different experts have different ways of getting the message across to the listeners. Another huge advantage I get while playing cricket commentaries is the accent does not vary significantly. I use this medium to get across the basics of speaking which is the rate of speech, voice modulation, pause, emphasis and the use of vocabulary.

The words used by the panel of commentators are very simple and easy to understand. They never use bombastic words. This gives students the motivation and drive to get fully involved in the learning process (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/forum-topic/integrating-language-sports).

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Ergativity in Pahari Language | The Robustness of Free Reading in Second and Foreign Language Education | Conversational Cloze as a Measure of Ability in English in Indian Schools | Teaching the Intangibles - The Role of the English Teacher | Failures and Disillusionment in Naipaul's Miguel Street | Issues and Problems in Ph.D. in English - Degree Quality Assurance in Pakistan | Socio-Linguistic Constraints of Code Switching in Hindi-English-Kannada Multilinguals | Nature of Perception according to Gautama | The Quintessence of Sports Psychology and Language | Some Characteristics of Tamil Jokes | Lexical Opposites in Tamil | The Fire and the Rain - Deriving Meaning for Modern Life from Myths | Realilty and Challenges for Tamil in a Multilingual Environment - Tamil in Malaysia: An Essay in Tamil | Teaching and Learning a Classical-Modern Language - Some Thoughts Relating to Tamil | HOME PAGE of December 2009 Issue | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR