Materials: Guidelines

Unless you think they will really have trouble, try letting the class do the vocabulary-meaning matching activity without preteaching of the words. Explain / elicit any harder words if they get stuck. You may find it helpful to use actual physical examples of some of the objects described to illustrate the dangers.

Then, have students mark a number of items in the list below which they think would be dangerous in the situation described. To increase the likelihood of disagreement you may want to specify a number of items that they must mark or must not exceed. Once they have made their decisions they are ready to compare their ideas, debating any that they disagree about.

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

For lower level groups you may want to model the dialogue first, making use of the sentence pattern at the bottom of the page as well the essential "Why do you think so?" and "Why, don't you agree?".

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.

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