Materials: Guidelines

This is based on a popular English-lesson game you probably know already, called Pelmanism (maybe you know it by another name). This one has a little extra twist to it.

The two worksheets need to copied onto two different colours of card, cut out and there needs to be one set for each group of three or four students. To play the game, both sets of card are randomly spread, face down on a table around which the students are gathered. One player starts by picking up a pair of cards, one of each colour.

This pair of cards will provide that student with a job (e.g. Pilot) and a requirement or quality (e.g. Good At Languages). The student then has a limited number of seconds linking the job with the requirement using a sentence of a pre-determined form. You might want to place this on the blackboard / whiteboard before you start. A good target sentence would be:

A teacher needs to be good at typing because she / he has to type many tests.

So faced with his / her two cards, the first student will attempt a sentence (e.g. A pilot needs to be good at languages because she / he has to talk to the passengers.) Whether or not this sentence is good enough, is up to the other members of the group and I think in this case they might possibly reject the sentence about the pilot. If the group do accept it as valid, the student gets to keep the pair of cards and the next student has a go. The winner is the student who accumulates the most pairs of cards by the end of the game.

One of the good things about this version of the game is that students are both trying to be creative with their own sentence creation, and listening critically to the sentences of other class members.

In the table below, the first row contains links for the "job cards" worksheet and the second row contains links fro the "job ability cards". You will need both for the game described above.

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.