Materials: Guidelines

If you want something to teach different items in US and UK vocab, this is not it. It is a class discussion sheet that introduces a lot of the vocabulary that we as teachers use when talking to each other about teaching.

Decide whether to preteach the vocabulary items or ask students to look them up in dictionaries. They may be able to guess a few of them (e.g. subtitles) from the context and their experience (of watching English-language movies). When they understand them all, ask students individually to read the sentences and make their own decisions about whether the sentences are true. As students finish, group them into 4s or 5s and ask them to compare their answers and debate any which they disagree on.

I find the technique of getting students to commit themselves to opinions in writing, before they discuss, is a good way of encouraging contention, especially where some class members have a tendency to always agree with what the last speaker said.

If students ask for correct answers a fairly safe response would be; that 1, 6, 7, and 8 are true and that in the case of number 3, American and British English are probably used by roughly equal numbers of people worldwide, but US English use is growing more quickly.

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.