Cricket on a Sunday morning, netball at noon, the squeak of trainers on a Saturday court — Sri Lankan school life is built around games, and games come with their own English. This unit teaches you how to talk about sport: how to report a match in clean past simple, how to describe a dramatic moment with the right tense, and how to argue, in a 200-word speech, that sport belongs at the heart of a student's life.
The grammar that fits is the past perfect continuous — "we had been playing for only a few minutes when it started to rain" — the tense for an action that had been rolling along for a while before something else interrupted it. You will also learn the neat trick of substitution ("So do I", "No, we didn't"), which lets you agree and answer without parroting whole sentences back.
In the Grade 10 role play, Binara asks Nisal whether he has met Ayub, and learns that Ayub had been trying to find Nisal all morning before going to watch the cricket match, but had not managed to. Nisal, it turns out, had a volleyball match himself — his team had been playing for only a few minutes when it started to rain and the match had to be abandoned. Binara's own cricket team fared better, winning by 5 wickets, with Methun scoring 76 runs and taking 3 wickets.
Listen to how natural the closing lines are: "I love cricket." "So do I." Nobody says "I love cricket too, I also love cricket" — that would be clumsy. English folds the whole repeated idea into two words. And notice "He had been trying to find you all morning… before he went to the match" — one action stretched out in time, then a second action cutting it off. Both of these are the bread and butter of this unit, and the conversation shows they are things people actually say, not exam inventions.
Picture a wet, muddy boy walking into class. You did not see him fall, but you know what he had been up to: "He had been playing in the field." That is the past perfect continuous — it describes an action that had been going on for a while in the past, right up to some later past moment, and it often leaves visible evidence behind, such as the mud, the tiredness, or the rain that stopped the game. It is the tense of "this had been happening up until then".
Think of it as a film already rolling when the camera cuts in. By the time we arrive at "yesterday morning", Ayub had already been searching for a while: "He had been trying to find you all morning." The recipe never changes for any subject: had been + the -ing form.
Make it negative by adding "not": "they had not been practising." Ask a question by moving "had" to the front: "Had you been waiting long?" The one real trap is that some verbs simply refuse the -ing form — verbs about states, not actions: know, understand, believe, belong, own. You cannot "be knowing" something. For these, fall back on the plain past perfect: "I had known her for ten years," never "I had been knowing her."
Good English hates saying the same thing twice in one breath. "I love cricket and Nisal loves cricket too" makes a listener wince, because "loves cricket" has been said twice. So English snips out the repeat and lets a tiny helping verb carry the meaning: "I love cricket and so does Nisal." The whole idea "loves cricket" hides inside that one word "does".
The trick is to find the helping verb hidden in the first half — do, did, have, will, is, was, can — and let it stand in for everything that would otherwise be repeated. To agree, use "So + helper + subject" (So do I, So will he). To answer short, just give the helper: "No, I haven't." It is like pointing at the full sentence instead of writing it out again.
| Long way | Short way |
|---|---|
| I love cricket and Nisal loves cricket too. | I love cricket and so does Nisal. |
| "Have you met Ayub today?" "No, I have not met him." | "No, I haven't." |
| "Did you win?" "No, we did not win." | "No, we didn't." |
| I will go to the next match and my brother will too. | I will go to the next match and so will my brother. |
Mind one detail: the helper must match the original verb. If the first half was past ("did you win?"), the short answer stays past ("we didn't"); if it was "have you…", you answer "I haven't." Match the helper and the reply sounds effortless.
A match report almost writes itself once these words are sorted into the order a game unfolds: the people on and around the field, the equipment they use, the verbs for the action, the result words for the score, and — the part the exam essay really rewards — the values sport teaches (fair play, team spirit, leadership). That last row is what turns a dry report into a persuasive speech.
| Category | Words |
|---|---|
| People | player, captain, umpire, referee, coach, spectator, sponsor, physio, trainer, twelfth man |
| Equipment | bat, ball, stumps, bails, racquet, net, helmet, pads, gloves, whistle |
| Verbs | throw, catch, hit, run, sprint, jump, score, pass, dribble, serve, bowl, field |
| Result words | win, lose, draw, tie, abandon, forfeit, postpone, score, run out, clean bowled, LBW |
| Values | fair play, team spirit, sportsmanship, discipline, leadership, perseverance, respect for the opponent |
A handful of sport facts recur in general-knowledge questions and comprehension passages, so it helps to have them ready. Volleyball is Sri Lanka's national sport, while cricket is by far its most popular spectator sport — Sri Lanka won the Cricket World Cup in 1996. Elle is a traditional Sri Lankan bat-and-ball game. Susanthika Jayasinghe won an Olympic silver medal in the women's 200 m at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Lasith Malinga is a Sri Lankan fast bowler known for taking three hat-tricks in Cricket World Cup matches — a record no other bowler holds.
A match report is journalism, so it front-loads the result — the headline gives the score before you read a word ("D.S. Senanayake 3, Nalanda 1"). It then answers the reader's questions in the order a sports fan asks them: when and where and against whom, how the game swung set by set with real numbers, who starred, and what comes next. It never gushes; the drama comes from the facts themselves. A strong closing line often slips in a past perfect — "the best match we had played all season" — tying the report neatly back to the grammar of this unit.
A model speech on "Sports as an important part of a student's life" wins by showing instead of telling. The opening does not announce "sport is important"; it puts the listener on the road outside school at four o'clock and lets them hear it — the bat, the trainers, the whistle. That sensory hook earns attention before the argument even starts. The speech then marches through three benefits, each launched by a signpost — Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly — and each proved with a concrete image rather than a slogan: patience on the cricket field, a runner's last 200 metres, a doctor's 45-minute figure. It closes on a direct call to act — "step out… join a team."
| Task | Official word count |
|---|---|
| Notice | 40–50 words |
| Paragraph (Test 8) | 50–60 words |
| Match report / letter (Test 14) | ~100 words — date, venue, teams → key moment → final score → outstanding player → forward line |
| Sports speech / essay (Test 16) | ~200 words — sensory hook → three benefits with concrete examples → call to action |
One small but easily-lost mark: cricket scores use plural forms — "5 wickets", "76 runs" — and a match report should give a full date (6th February 2027), not just "last Saturday".
The past perfect continuous is a regular in the verb-form and word-box passages, and "Sports as an important part of a student's life" is one of the most predictable Test 16 essay titles there is. The sports vocabulary and the match-report shape feed the comprehension and description tasks too.
| Past-paper test | What was tested |
|---|---|
| 2018 Test 12 | Verb-form passage on P Sara Oval — cricket vocabulary + tenses |
| 2018 Test 16 (b) | Essay on 'Sports as an important part of a student's life' |
| 2016 Test 15 | Comprehension: Olympic Dreams (Jesse Owens / Charles Paddock) |
| 2019 Test 1 | Match notices to places — includes sports settings |
| 2020 Test 13 | Match films / interests to viewers — includes sport documentaries |
| Every Test 11/12 | Past perfect continuous in word-box and verb-form passages |