Materials: Guidelines

You may want to explain / elicit vocabulary before students start the matching exercise, but in this instance it might be better to ask them to use dictionaries for only those words that they really can't figure out.

When doing the matching exercise, students who finish early could discuss (in small groups) whether they think the character types described are good or bad. You could explain that although the words all have a negative feel to them, some of them describe qualities that are good in less obvious ways. (e.g. a slave driver isn't nice to work under but she / he increases productivity)

Hopefully, as students complete the matching grid, they will already be thinking of colleagues (or past colleagues) who fit some of the descriptions. In the second part, they get the chance to talk about these people. Tell them to complete (some) of the sentences with names of people they know. Then, as they finish divide them into groups of three to five where they can read their sentences and answer questions about them.

In the final part, ask them to think of names in their own language for certain kinds of people commonly found in a work or school environment and to write one or two of these expressions along with English explanations in the spaces at the bottom of the page. If your class contains people from a number of different nationalities or even from a number of different professions it may be worth discussing these as well. If, on the other hand, they work in the same company they will probably all write the same things - well maybe not.

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.