Time Idioms: Explanation

Time Idioms

• Details

Name of Item	Time Idioms - It's high time you learnt them!
Activity Type	Vocabulary / Discussion
Student Level	Intermediate - Upper Intermediate
Time Allowance	15 - 20 minutes
Preparation Required	Nothing special
Other Items Needed	Nothing special
Vocabulary	It's time to / it's high time.. / there's no time like.. / time and time again / at a bad time / the time of my life / a hard time / spare the time / time on your hands / time's up / waste time
Grammar	Sentence patterns for the above phrases

• Instructions

Lucky students with good English-English dictionaries will find most of these phrases in the extensive "time section". Alternatively, if you read the sentences and "act it up a bit" they should get a feeling for what is being communicated both from your voice and the other words in the sentence. They should then be able to home in on the correct meaning from the list at the top of the page. Either way they will probably arrive at a correct set of answers most effectively, working as small groups or pairs.

Having sorted out the meanings, you can then expand upon this by having them discuss what the probable situation is in each case and work out who both the speaker and listener might be. You could then ask each group / pair to select one of the utterances and write the utterance that came either before or after this one. They could then practice and perform their "mini dialogs" for other groups.