Negative Character Traits
This is an advanced PDF worksheet about how we discuss negative personality traits such as rudeness, greed, or arrogance. The worksheet has speaking, reading, and listening elements. It also focuses on language used to show that something is just an impression (e.g. ‘he comes across as arrogant’).
The worksheet starts with a few warm up questions, and then asks the students to read some sentences and match them to the negative traits in a box. Many of these traits are more advanced vocabulary such as ‘pretentious’ or ‘condescending.’ Some of the sentences may have multiple negative character traits you could assign to it, but there is usually one perfect words for the sentence.
After this, students will read about expressions used to emphasise that something is just an impression such as ‘He seems..’ or ‘I get the impression that..’. Students will then be asked to read through a series of statements that could be seen as either positive or negative. For example, there is a statement that could be seen as either arrrogant or confidant depending on your point of view. Students will read though these statements and discuss their impresssions.
Next, the class will read an article about why some people are rude, and how we should react to them. The article also has several comnprehension questions. This article should also spark conversation, as people tend to have very different approaches on how to deal with rudeness.
After this is a listening section, in which students must listen to 3 arguments between housemates. For each argument the students must answer 3 questions, but also use the words they have learned to describe the people involved.
Finally, the class ends with a series of conversation questions in which students should be able to practice what they have learned and discusss negative personality traits in a more general sense.
The transcript for the audio can be found at the end of the Teacher’s Version (TV).
