Materials: Guidelines

This work-sheet is designed to introduce eight different sentence patterns for giving advice of both the "Do" variety and the "Don't" variety. You might want to present them with a minor problem of your own (maybe imaginary) to see what language they already know and use in their suggestions.

Give out the work sheet, explain that problem on the left correspond to suggestions on the left but that the order is scrambled. Tell them to match the suggestions to the problems by writing numbers in the right-most column. When they have all finished and have made sure that they all ahve the same answers, ask them to discuss together in small groups whether the suggestions are good or bad. Some of the advice should be fairly obviously wrong.

Next ask students to look again at the "suggestion phrases" in bold writing and decide if they are "Do" suggestions or "Don't" suggestions. Some of the phrases are not as obvious as they might seem. The correct groupings are as shown below.

• Do :Why not use...? / Why don't you put...? / How about thinking..? / You should...
• Don't :There's no point... / It's no good... / You shouldn't...

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.