Are you tense about tenses?

[Т А Кузнецова]

Are you tense about tenses?

When teaching grammar the teachers think about tips and a number of exercises to make students be aware about grammatical item.

I found an article on www.busyteacher.org about ideas how to make grammar more appealing.

Students always struggle with question formation in any tense. Basing activities around this practice can be really useful in order to solidify one tense or compare several at a time. There is also the issue of creating information questions vs. yes/no or closed questions. It’s a good idea to practice both types in a variety of ways. You could provide simple prompts like:

Mary/movies: See how many questions they can make with simple prompts

You could do a mingling exercise like Find Someone Who and use all the tenses they have learned recently. If you provide the prompt, the students will have to formulate the questions. For example, Find someone who…

Has had a tooth ache (what will they have to ask each other?)

Had been a doctor in their country

Has been learning English for more than 4 years

Flashcards

Flashcards are suitable for most any level of tenses or conjugations. They are valuable because once you have made them you can use them for all different types of drills, activities and prompts. Students appreciate the opportunity to work with cards as they are something hands-on that they can touch and manipulate. You can generate all types of card activities, and remember that the point is to get the students working together. You’ll definitely want to have a selection of cards for irregular past tense verbs. You can create sets of cards for all the irregular verbs and then use them as prompts, to play matching games, or to do perform various drills. Then once you get to higher level tenses you can refer back to the past tense cards and combine them with helping verb cards or time markers.