Can You Do My Job? is a simple game which allows your Business English‏‎ students to practice modal verb constructions.

As with all activities, you should introduce this to your class in stages.

What do you do?

Using simple declarative sentences, write on the board a few statements about what you – as a teacher – do in your job.

1. I mark homework every night.
2. I prepare lessons.
3. I give grammar explanations to my students.

Next, ask your students to do the same and make several statements about their own job. Go around the class and check but allow them to consult each other and/or dictionaries‏‎ to help out with this stage.

Can you do it?

The next step is to explain to your students that they have just won a six month holiday in the Bahamas. They must now interview a few other students in the class to find a temporary replacement.

Explain to the students how to make good modal questions about the statements they’ve just put together. In your case it would be something like:

1. Are you able to mark homework every night?
2. Would you be able to prepare lessons?
3. Could you give good grammatical explanations?

Your students might come up with something like this:

1. Are you able to use a computer?
2. Can you speak German?
3. Would you be able to go to Argentina for a week every month?

What happens next is that the students interview each other. Divide the class into two: interviewers and candidates.

They take turns to interview three or four candidates (you might like to set a time limit on this part, say five minutes per candidate) and think about the best candidate for the job. And of course during the interviews you are helping out with answers:

1. I can use a PC quite well.
2. Yes. I can speak it reasonably well.
3. Well, I could go once every other month if that was ok.

Next the candidates and interviewers swap roles. At this point you may need to revise a few of the points

Who gets the job?

To finish off you can get feedback from the class as a whole about the whole exercise. Which questions caused problems? What good answers did they get? And so on.

Finally, it’s time to find out who gets the jobs!