Games



[|Word games]

1.

Activity: a gony aunt variations
One of the most popular and common activities to practise the modal verbs should (and sometimes ought to) are situations in which people ask for advice. Many newspapers have ‘agony aunt’ columns (sometimes called ‘Dear Abby’ columns in North America). There are two ways you can use these in class.
 * 1) Find some original letters and their answers on the Internet. You can do this by entering ‘agony aunt’ or ‘dear abby’ on a search engine. Select some questions and the answers given (better if they are short). Mix up the questions and the answers and distribute them to the students, who have to match them. When they have finished, ask them to go through and find any modal verbs in the text. As a follow up, ask students to write their own advice to those people.
 * 2) Ask students to each write about a problem they have (real or imaginary) that they would like advice on. They should write these on a slip of paper, but not write their name. Collect all the slips of paper and put the students into groups of four. Give each group four ‘problems’ at random. Tell them to select two and give advice to the writer about their problem (including modal verbs such as should, ought to, shouldn’t etc). When groups have finished, ask them to read out the problem and the advice.