Giving Advice: a free downloadable Power Point Presentation on should, ought to, had better with their grammar rules
Giving Advice: a Power Point Presentation.
Level:
This lesson can be used on all ages of intermediate to advanced students.
Target:
The aim of this lesson is to teach students how to give advice in English, using should, ought to, had better
Preparation:
First print the activity sheet. Photocopy one activity sheet for each student in the class.
Introduction:
After going through your regular review and teacher talk. Tell the students that you’re going to learn and practice how to give advice in English.
Procedure
Go through the grammar and the exercises together.
Wrap Up
Ask the students if they have any doubts.
Thank them for coming to the lesson.
Giving advice in English might seem tricky at first. There are several ways to do it and each uses a slightly sentence structure. Here they are:
Use a modal verb
There are two modal verbs we often use for giving advice: ‘should’ and ‘ought to’. Both mean the same thing but work in slightly different ways. Let’s look at some examples.
You should do more travelling.
You shouldn’t drink so much beer.
As you can see above, after ‘should’ we use an infinitive without ‘to’.
You ought to do more travelling.
You ought not to drink so much beer.
Unlike ‘should’, we always use ‘to’ in ‘ought to’ for giving advice.
Make it into a question
To make advice less direct, we can use a question to make the person we are advising consider about the advice we are giving them.
Why don’t you do some more tidying?
How about doing some more tidying?
With the question ‘Why don’t you…?’ we use an infinitive without ‘to’. When we use ‘How about…?’ to make a question, we use a gerund after it.
Put yourself in the person’s position
If someone is asking for your advice, sometimes it’s useful to imagine yourself being in that person’s position. This is a good way to explain your advice, too.
If I were you, I would travel more
Remember to use an infinitive after ‘would’ and not ‘to’. To make this negative, put ‘not’ after ‘would’.
Make a suggestion
A suggestion or recommendation is another good way of giving advice that isn’t to direct. You can use the words ‘suggest’ or ‘recommend’ as in the example below.
I would suggest doing more of an effort.
I would recommend doing this instead.
Use ‘verb+ing’ after ‘suggest’ or ‘recommend’ to explain your advice to the listener. To make these negative, put ‘not’ before your ‘verb+ing’.
Advise in a stronger way
Sometimes, you need to make your advice stronger to let the listener know that it’s really important. We can use the expression ‘you had better…’ to do this.
You had (You’d) better start working on your homework.
You had (You’d) better finish this assignment in time.
We use an infinitive after ‘better’ to explain our advice and add ‘not’ after ‘better’ to make the sentence negative.
Here is a power point:
DOWNLOAD THE POWER POINT FOR FREE
