Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Texas? Are you interested in teaching English in Bandera, Texas? Check out our opportunities in Bandera, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
After mentioning that there are twelve tenses in the English language (concerning TESL that is), this unit went over the four present tenses, which are present simple, present progressive (continuous), present perfect, and present perfect continuous. Past, present and future tenses all have these four sub-tenses, thus the number of tenses taught to ESL students is twelve.
There are some languages that do not have as many tenses as English, so, depending on their background, it is incredibly difficult for some students to grasp all the forms. Having been an ESL teacher in Japan for about three years now I have experienced this difficulty in comprehension myself. The Japanese language really does not have a future tense the way English does, leaving my students with only a vague understanding of the future tense and how to use it. Their use of present continuous is completely different as well, leading to many grammatical errors and much confusion.
The proper way to form all four types of the present tenses in both affirmative and negatives sentences was diagramed, as well as how to form questions in them. The present simple tense is intuitively the simplest, and does not require any axillary verbs in its affirmative formation. The auxiliary verb do is used in its negative and question forms however. The spelling change for third person singular may be a challenge for language learners as well. In addition to the different formations of the present perfect tense, all of its usages were outlined, as well as common problems students are likely to run into with the tense and various Activate activities that can be utilized to practice it. I will not reiterate all of the information that was given, but just mention that there are seven different usages for the present perfect tense.
The same was done for all the other present tenses (i.e., present progressive, present perfect and present perfect continuous). These become a bit trickier in usage and formation, and all forms take an auxiliary verb. Present progressive uses the auxiliary verb do, and present perfect and present perfect continuous use the auxiliary verb have. The latter two also use the past participle of a verb. There are six usages for the present progressive form, four for the perfect, and two for the perfect continuous.
Having it all laid out in front of me made it easier to appreciate the difficulty students must have in formation and usage of these tenses. The use of auxiliary verbs seems particularly challenging, so forming questions properly can become very difficult, which is what I observe in my daily work. It becomes seemingly impossible when the conjugation for third person singular switches from the main verb to the auxiliary. There were a lot of good exercises listed though and practice makes perfect.
