Basic English (For Science and Tourism Students) 17/9

Simple Past

I used the same lesson plan in this class that I used on the 12th of September in Basic English for Letras students.  (See that blog entry for more details).

However, one thing that I modified was the activity. To cater to a more Basic level of English, we did the pair activity as a class. Instead of having the students come up with questions in pairs, which would have been too difficult for them at this point, I came up with the questions and had them practice by answering. This was challenging for them but I saw improvement throughout the activity. I would hold up a picture and ask the students a question about something that happened in the picture. Some of my questions had affirmative answers and some of them had negative answers in order to help the students practice how forming the past tense is different in the two scenarios.

When you answer a question affirmatively in the past you simply put the verb in the past tense in your response. However when you answer a question negatively in the past tense your response includes "did not + infinitive verb"

For example:
I ate dinner last night (Affirmative response)
I did not eat dinner last night (negative response)

They seemed to understand the concept because they struggled at the beginning of class but by the end were speaking correctly and able to explain the reason why the affirmative and negative sentences were different in the past.

We also reviewed the verb TO BE in the past and discussed that it is the only verb that changes with different people in the past tense (other verbs remain the same, no matter who you are talking about).