Friday, January 29, 2016

PowerPoint for Drilling Past Simple

(TESOL Worksheets--Past Simple)
[This is a PowerPoint presentation I used to run oral drills in my classroom with verbs in the past simple.
All of the verbs come from the textbook lesson assigned to the class (English World 3 Unit 1), but perhaps this can stand on in its own, so I'm posting it here.
The choice of verbs, however, was clearly dictated by the textbook.  I would not have chosen verbs like "like" and "live" to introduce students to the past tense, because the contrast between past and present is not so clear with state verbs.  (If you liked ice-cream yesterday, chances are you will still like it today.)  Nevertheless, these were the verbs the textbook was introducing, so these were the pronunciations I needed to drill.  I tried to set the context as best I could, but admittedly the sentences "Yesterday I liked ice-cream" and "Yesterday I lived in a house" are pretty artificial.
These type of artificial, unnatural sentences used purely for drilling a particular grammar point are very much out of favor in current TESOL methodology.  But I like to think I spend enough time in my classes giving the students exposure to comprehensible input that I can afford to do the odd artificial grammar drill from time-to-time.
Anyway, for whatever it may or may not be worth, the PowerPoint presentation is on Google: drive, slides, pub]

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