English Blog is proud to announce the starting of a page especially for clearing the doubts of students and teachers. We request the whole hearted support of all of you teachers in clearing the doubts of students. | | |

Thursday, May 15, 2014

A great Cheat-Sheet for mastering English Tense

Dear Teachers,
                   I think it would be nice if we could include a "learn grammar" link on our site's home page, alongside the links for various classes. You sure must have seen sites like englishpage.com.

                    I think there is no point in having separate packages for bright and weak students. If our idea is to keep things simple, why split it into easy and hard? Everything gets a bit harder as we move along; we should just focus on getting the basics right. A more practical approach, I think, would be to have separate material for UP, HS and HSS.

              I'm sending you, for your feedback, a pdf of a cheat-sheet I prepared for explaining English tense to my students. (The title is intentionally flashy; the kids do hate tense and grammar, after all ;-)  When I attempted teaching tense, I found it nearly impossible to sustain their interest and attention as I explained the 12 tenses individually.

                 So I tried an alternate method - first I would explain the three SIMPLE TENSES in one go, and then introduce the rest of the tenses as the THREE ASPECTS. I have found it to be a more intuitive way to explain tenses. I just tell them that one aspect is for actions in a complete state (PERFECT), another for actions in an incomplete state (PROGRESSIVE) and the third for actions in a prolonged state of continuity (PERFECT PROGRESSIVE). I found it better to avoid the term continous tense, because students tend to confuse it with the perfect continuous tense which actually shows continuity.

                         I could explain it all in an hour, without having to write down the "Subj.+ aux + verb + @#$!... "  formulas for each. I put all these points down on print and give them photocopies. I added quiet a few sample sentences for each tense to illustrate my point. The students tend to grasp the idea better using this method. Then I included other things like irregular verbs and Auxiliaries. Then added a reference chart for passive voice and interrogative sentences, on the last page.

                  It's a bit confusing to the uninitiated learner. But after a few weeks of refering back to it in between regular lessons, they would get the idea and then, each item on the cheat sheet would become handy as a memory aid and reference chart. At least, I hope so.

I would value your feedback a lot.

Regards,

Anoop MS
Santhigiri Vidyabhavan HSS
Tvm


1 comment:

  1. Venkedesh G- The technique is good and handy for the teachers. Even average students can follow.

    ReplyDelete