Introducing of the past time tenses Kasia Żurowska
Level: Upper-intermediate
1. Lead-in and elicitation
Teacher welcomes students after the weekend. The teacher can say, "When I woke up this morning, I quickly ate breakfast, gathered my papers and drove to work. By the time I arrived at the office, I was exhausted because I had fought my way through traffic. Just as I was sitting down with a cup of tea, the phone rang. My daughter was calling to tell me I had forgotten to turn off the water faucet. The sink had overflowed and water was all over the floor. This day has not gone well for me." The teacher could then write the verbs on the board and have the students identify which tenses were used. Then she would elicit similar stories from the students and write their verbs on the board. Then as a follow-up activity the students will create short written stories with verbs underlined and identified by each student.
2. Explanation
Then the teacher will explain the past tense in more detail and give out a handout describing the simple past, past progressive, past perfect and present perfect tenses.
Exercise: group work
After a brief overview of the various tenses, the teacher will break the students up into four groups. She will assign each group one of the four forms of the past tense and ask them to prepare a presentation that will explain the form. She will provide readable reference grammar’s for each group and encourage each group to provide examples that will explain their past tense form.
3. Accurate reproduction
Exercise: drill
Students are producing structure on the basis of their knowledge. They have to decide how to match words and what will be appropriate. They have to write short 3-sentence story about e.g. a burglar (using past tenses).
A burglar
a) usually: play with children/steal a sculpture
b) clothes: pink and nice/ black and scruffy
c) scared of: police and owners of objects/ snakes and spiders
Exercise: work in pairs
Students are writing a story about a crime committed in their neighborhood in the past. They are directed to use as many verbs as possible in past tenses. After exercise is finished, stories are read aloud in class.
As a follow-up, teacher focuses on lexical expansion of some of the more important/higher frequency verbs. The teacher then brainstorms with the students to help them identify helpful collocations of a verb, such as: to catch...a bus, plane, taxi, a fish, a burglar etc.
4. Immediate creativity
Exercise: individual work
Each student is asked to choose a popular figure from their country. They are asked to write a short biographical sketch. This sketch could include interesting facts, why this person is popular in their country and why they have a personal interest in them. After finishing their sketch, they are asked to underline all of the simple past, past progressive and past irregular verb forms that are found in their sketch.
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