Obligation, prohibition and advice
Overview
Students will examine obligation, prohibition, and advice in this elementary-level ESL lesson. We focus on common constructions such as must, have to, and should to express various degrees of necessity, prohibition, and guidance. This lesson aims to enhance their ability to convey rules, recommendations, and personal advice in English, enabling more precise and effective communication.
The lesson plan begins with suggested boardwork, highlighting one approach to presenting the target language. Following this, students will work on several low-resource classroom activities, focusing on collaborative speaking and writing tasks. To end things on a high note, we've also included a couple of ideas for fun group games, reinforcing the learning objectives and ensuring students leave the class with a practical grasp of these modals.
Lesson Outline
Classroom activities
Use of the board
Demonstrate how we express obligation, prohibition and advice by giving examples that use some common modal verbs.
Step through each of these common constructions, eliciting as many examples as you can from your students and adding the best ones to the board.
Following the rules
A writing activity where students create rules by filling in the blanks.
A piece of advice
For this pairwork writing activity, the students will use the target language to create statements of advice.
Dangerous Dan
A group writing activity where the students consider what advice they could give to a fictional character drawn on the board.
Dinner party bore
For this activity, the students discuss and debate a couple of important topics using modal verbs of obligation and advice.
Classroom games
20 Questions: Modal verbs of Obligation
Players have to ask yes/no questions to determine which occupation their classmate is thinking about.
Pictionary: Obligation
Players have to represent modal verbs of obligation on the board while their teammates guess the answers.
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750+ Low-prep classroom activity ideas
1100+ Printable ESL flashcards
180+ ESL lesson plans
8 Distinct language levels
Offline access through the TEFLHandbook app
Reduce your planning time and improve the way you present and teach English grammar.
