Global education, sports and teaching the mother tongue: a dynamic relationship

Sports are present everywhere in our lives, and we relate to them both in a passive and an active way. Sports may be the key to understand some of the main features of the 21st century society: globalization, multiculturalism, multilingualism, great migrations. Education for a global society must not ignore these realities, independently of what is being taught/learned. Therefore, since the 1990s, international organizations and national governments have been trying to define essential competencies to be an active citizen in today’s society. The teaching/learning of the mother tongue plays an important role in this context, because it contributes to the development of transversal competences essential to life in the 21st century. This importance is recognized, both at political and educative levels. Such an assumption supposes a transversal approach to that process, which may associate the mother tongue to any topic relevant in modern society. Therefore, sports and the teaching/learning of the mother tongue must collaborate to ensure a more suitable education for children who already live in a global society and have to learn how to deal with it. In this paper, we intend to show that this is possible presenting some pedagogical and didactic suggestions based on the content analysis of the Portuguese programs for teaching the mother tongue in the first four years of compulsory education and taking profit of the popularity of sports among children and their formative potential.