I've used this sheet a few times to introduce the general topic of complaints and apologies at the beginning of a lesson (epecially if I knew some of the attendees were going to be a few minutes late).

As instructed on the sheet itself, students match the people in the "italic" list with the complaint / apology situations in the grid below.This should probably be fairly uncontentious, but you might want to run through it briefly before going on to the discussion phase.

Before actually talking about the different situations, students put a tick alongside any that they think they would complain about. You might also suggest that they try to think of a reason why at the same time.

To maximize discussion, you might want to discretely look over the students' shoulders as they make their choices and then pair up people with (radically) different answers. The length of any discussion that ensues depends largely on how many situations they disagree about.

You have a choice of two different methods of getting this handout to your printer. It all depends on whether your computer has "Adobe Acrobat Reader" installed. If it has, then this would be the recommended method for printing out the worksheet. Try selecting the "PDF (Adobe Acrobat)" link below. If all goes well, a new application window should appear including a print button, which when selected will print out one copy.

If, on the other hand you do not have "Adobe Acrobat" select the "HTML (web page)" link below. (Also, this method is recommended for users of Netscape Navigator, which seems to have trouble interacting with the Acrobat program like this.) If all goes well, a new browser window will open, from which you can either click the "print button" on the toolbar or open the "File" menu, select "Print" and then adjust the "Print Dialog Box" to your own preferences.

The final link below is to enable you to print this "instruction page" if you want to. Click on the link, and when the page appears on a new screen you will be able to print it using the browser's "print button" or "file menu". After printing, close the window again so that you can continue to navigate around the site.

For teacher training courses, English courses in Bristol UK and free interactive exercises, visit The Language Project Website.