To make or to do, that is the question

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Vocabulary - make and do collocations

make and do collocations

LESSON OVERVIEW

With this worksheet, we want to deal with make and do as these two verbs are often confused by students. We focus here first on make and do collocations and then on more demanding fixed phrases.

B2 / Upper Intermediate30 minStandard LessonPremium Plan

BASIC COLLOCATIONS

The worksheet starts with the more basic stuff that your B2 students should already know. First, they have to fill in the table with the correct words to create make and do collocations. Next, there is some free practice and speaking tasks to reinforce these collocations. Students choose five phrases from the previous exercise and write questions with them. Then, they work in pairs and ask each other the questions they’ve written.

FIXED PHRASES

Next, we move to fixed phrases with the verbs make and do. Students will have to decide which verb to use to create these phrases and identify their meanings from the context. In this task, we want students to learn phrases such as do without, do somebody good, make sense, make room for, make a killing, etc.

Finally, the worksheet ends a short speaking task which includes new phrases. Students work in pairs and discuss the points we prepared.

RELATED LESSON PLANS

This worksheet goes well with our lesson plan:

WORKSHEETS

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  1. DaveMar

    This lesson is mega useful, ESPECIALLY for Italian, Spanish and Portuguese students!

    1. Stan

      Great to hear that! It’s a good exercise for Polish students as well. Basically, ‘do’ and ‘make’ translate to the same verb in Polish so the difference between those two verbs in English is not so obvious for Polish learners.

  2. Betty Sz

    Very nice lesson , though I would say that it is a lower level – B1 or B1+ perhaps. Most of the phrases are spoken phrases that even some A2 students can recognise.

    1. Stan

      Thanks for the comment! I’d say that the first task is a bit easier but the phrases in the second part of the lesson are not phrases for A2/B1. All in all, the whole point of this worksheet is to work on collocations and this should be particularly useful to nationals from countries where ‘make’ and ‘do’ translate to the same word in their L1.

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