Materials: Guidelines

This worksheet encourages the repeated use of ten basic questions for first meetings in business settings. More advanced classes may use it for revision / as a warmer and if you decide to this, you may want to blank out the questions at the bottom of the page to make the students work a little harder.

The activity is more enjoyable / productive if the students invent totally new identities for themselves and are able to put a bit of thought into these identities. So it's worth giving them five minutes to invent the details and write them in the first column of the worksheet, before asking them to interview their first partner.

With lower level groups, you may want to demonstrate the target dialogue with the help ofa stronger student before the whole group gets going (or stuck). With a more able group, you want to suggest that they ask further follow-on questions with each main question. Information about their first interviewee goes in the "second person column"

With their next partner, students should ask about their partner's previous partner and write the information in the "third person" column. In this way they also get to practice using the questions in the "third person singular".

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.