Materials: Guidelines

Some of these phrases can be quite aggressive so you may want to think twice about using it with some groups, but then again, it may be just the thing for waking up others. When introducing them, I always try to convey the typical feeling intended with my tone of voice / speed of delivery / facial expressions. To avoid causing possible offense, it's a good idea to make it very clear that these utterances are directed away from students, either at an imaginary person in the corner, or a magazine picture / poster of an annoying looking person.

To start off with, you could read out the phrases (as described above) and then students can work (in pairs or individually) to match them to the people they are intended to "emote at". You could repeat the process if they don't get the hang of it straight away.

Once the whole class has the same answers, ask students individually to write names of people they would like to say the phrases to. (Hopefully your name won't be on the list - like mine was once.) Then tell them to ask each other about those people and their reasons for wanting to "mouth off at them".

The final part is a series of discussion questions built around further phrases involving "get". It's probably best to elicit meanings for these expressions after the students have had a chance to read the questions, but before they actually start to speak.

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.