Materials: Guidelines

The "making definitions" work-sheet is fairly self-explanatory. At first glance the "grammar words" used in the upper table might seem confusing to some students so it's probably best to start by looking at the four specimen sentences and go from there to identifying the different parts of the sentences.

Once this has been made clear and the students can happily point to the different parts of the sentences, you can move on to having them identify what the things are that are being defined in each. The definitions themselves are not very clear and there are a number of possibilities, epecially for "a" which could be pancakes, cake, omelette, scrambled egg or even ice-cream. You should point out here that adding further clauses to a definition makes the meaning more specific to one thing.

Next, students should work (together in pairs) to produce definitions for the four items at the bottom of the page. In each case, several clauses will be necessary to make the mening clear.

Finally, give each class member one or two cards, which they should not show to the others. Tell them to write definitions for the words on their cards and be prepared to read those definitions. As students finish writing, gather them into groups of four or five to read their definitions aloud and have other group members try to guess what the words on their cards are.

In the table below the first row gives links to download and print the "making definitions" worksheet. This should be printed in landcsape format. See below. The second row gives links for the "definable words" worksheet. This is printed in regular "portrait" format.

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.

If you are using the "web page method" you will need to set the web browser to print in Landscape Format. This is quite easy with Internet Explorer and a little more involved with Netscape Navigator.

With Internet Explorer: Click on the "file menu", select page "set-up" and select the "landscape" selector button near the bottom of the dialogue box.

With Netscape, you need to actually start the printing procedure first. Click on the "file menu" and select "print". When the print dialogue box appears, click on the "Properties..." button, then use the printer's dialog boxes to set the paper layout to "landscape".

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.