Lucky students with good English-English dictionaries will find most of these phrases in the extensive "time section". Alternatively, if you read the sentences and "act it up a bit" they should get a feeling for what is being communicated both from your voice and the other words in the sentence. They should then be able to home in on the correct meaning from the list at the top of the page. Either way they will probably arrive at a correct set of answers most effectively, working as small groups or pairs.

Having sorted out the meanings, you can then expand upon this by having them discuss what the probable situation is in each case and work out who both the speaker and listener might be. You could then ask each group / pair to select one of the utterances and write the utterance that came either before or after this one. They could then practice and perform their "mini dialogs" for other groups.

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.