PATRICIA WILCOX PETERSON
A REVIEW OF THE ENGLISH TENSE SYSTEM
Introduction
This book is a review of the relationships between times and tenses in English. It is intended for beginning and intermediate level language students in non-English speaking countries, as a reinforcement and addition to their regular structure classes. The chapter dealing with each tense may be used as soon as the students have covered that tense in their formal grammar study. Alternatively, the teacher may want to present certain groups of tenses together if the student seems to be having trouble with a particular concept; for instance, he could teach all the perfect tenses or all the continuous tenses together.
The English tense system is quite complicated, but the most common problem is not how to form tenses. The mechanical manipulation of verbs is easily learned through a few rules and formulas. The biggest problem is deciding which tense to use in a given situation. In order to choose correctly and easily, the student must understand the meaning of the tense itself, its time picture or time line. He must know what kinds of activities and states can be described by certain verbs. Certain groups of verbs are limited in their usage, and this can present problems, too. Finally, the student needs to be able to choose accurate time markers to clarify the time picture.
In response to these problems, this book has as its goals:
1. to present clear time lines for each tense
2. to introduce categories of verbs which act in certain ways: punctual verbs, durative verbs, and non-continuous verbs
3. to teach the proper use of time markers to show points in time, frequency, and duration for each tense.
Because this is a supplementary text, it is suggested that the teacher use it for short periods of time. Ten or fifteen minutes per day is long enough. In that amount of time, students can work with the reading selection and one or two exercises. One chapter may take two or three days to finish at this rate.
The vocabulary for the book is based on the 1000-word level as given in The New Horizon Ladder Dictionary of the English Language, by John Robert-Shaw, Popular Library. When it was necessary to use words from a higher word level, they have been given as vocabulary items at the beginning of the chapter. The teacher may want to pre-teach these words before going on to the reading selection. In most cases these less frequent words were chosen because they are represented in the picture; accordingly, their meaning should be easy to understand from the picture.
The pronunciation exercises provide the normal spoken reduced forms for standard American English. When these forms have been accepted in written form as contractions, they are contracted in the text. When they are not written, but only spoken forms, they are not contracted in the text. However, even the reduced forms are commonly used by educated speakers. They are not slang. The teacher may use them in the chapter readings and exercises, even when the printed form itself doesn`t reflect these reductions. For example, in chapter five, the spoken form for what is is given as /wet s/; in the next chapter, a question following the reading selection is, “What is hanging like a brown cloud over New York today?” Although the written form shows two words, the teacher may safely reduce them to /wet s/. All phonetic notations conform to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Finally, this book is meant to be used primarily for aural/oral activities. Read the selections aloud. Have the students pronounce all the words, repeating in phrases. Do the questions and exercises aloud, with books closed. (It may help to draw the correct time line on the board as well, as an additional memory aid.) Encourage the use of role-playing and dialogues, and give the students many opportunities to use all the tenses in their speaking activities. The exercises entitled Changing Times, Changing Tenses are comparatively unstructured. They provide the student with an opportunity to pick the correct tenses in free conversation. Such practice is lecessary if the student is to achieve the ultimate goal, that of choosing and using the correct tense easily.
My thanks go to the people in the photo library of the Denver Post, who helped me find most of the pictures for the book. It was a long process. It is my hope that the people who use this book will find the pictures as interesting as I did, and that the pictures will stimulate lots of discussion!
Changing Times, Changing Tenses
A Review of the English Tense System
Patricia Wilcox Peterson
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PATRICIA WILCOX PETERSON 1
A REVIEW OF THE ENGLISH TENSE SYSTEM 1
Introduction 1
Changing Times, Changing Tenses 3
A Review of the English Tense System 3
Patricia Wilcox Peterson 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
Unit One: The Present Tense 5
chapter one LITTER IS A PROBLEM IN OUR CITIES 5
chapter two PEOPLE WORK AT MANY DIFFERENT JOBS 8
chapter three HANDICAPPED PEOPLE DO USEFUL WORK 15