Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Texas? Are you interested in teaching English in Socorro, Texas? Check out our opportunities in Socorro, 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!
This unit had a similar format to unit 4 on the present tense, but instead looked at the past tense. In particular, it covered the uses and conjugation of the past simple, past perfect, past continuous, and past perfect continuous tenses.
There were several things I was attentive to that I may want to cover in my own classes, even with the university students that I will be teaching, and that is teasing out the subtleties between these tenses and how they are used.
The simple past is the easiest to comprehend although the irregular verb conjugations can prove difficult to those learning English (I do think using flashcards or other games might help in this).
I love the past continuous tense for its literary quality. For example, the tense if often used to describe interrupted past actions, which adds tension and suddenness to a narrative. I think writing short story or screenplay in the past tense would be a great way to learn more about the use of this tense with higher-level English learners.
I think that both past perfect and past perfect continuous can also be difficult to grasp because of their multiple components (conjugating 'to have,' adding a past participle, and adding 'been' for past perfect continuous). I will be teaching Chinese students, and Mandarin contains no verb conjugations, so I think that understanding the nuanced use of these tenses will be a good challenge to tackle. I like the description of past perfect as "the past in the past," because it is succinct and to the point, but also reveals the strangeness of the concept. It is also a tense that you can work around when speaking by using the simple past, but adding past perfect to one's arsenal will clearly demonstrate higher understanding and command of English and it adds a different tone to the meaning of a sentence. This also applies to the past perfect continuous. Maybe I can find a short story we can read by a simple writer like Hemingway or Carver and take a look at their use of these tenses.
