Editorial
This article was first published in English Teaching Professional 36, January 2005

Tense and Time

Simon Mumford, Turkey

Simon Mumford teaches EAP at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. He has written on using stories, visuals, drilling, reading aloud, vocabulary and is especially interested in the creative teaching of grammar. E-mail: simon.mumford@ieu.edu.tr

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Time traveller
Double question relay
Fortune telling
Class reunion
Temporary activities
Tense diary
Chain of actions
Rolling drills
Twenty-one

Here are some activities for practising and/or revising tenses. The aim of some is to give practice in a way that will make the meaning clear, while in others students are practising the form. In all of them, the emphasis is on fun and communication. The activities use resources that are readily available; cards, pictures, cardboard, the classroom and time itself.

Time traveller

Draw a time line on the board from the year 1400 to the present. Mark on them some inventions and discoveries; elicit these or find them from a reference book or the internet. For example, Columbus reached America in 1492, first portable clock was invented around 1500, the postal stamp in the 1840’s, the television invented in 1940’s (See www.inventors.about.com for more inventions.) Choose a date in the past, and tell the class they have to find this out by asking present perfect questions such as: ‘Have you ever seen a hot air balloon?’‘Have you ever used a stamp?’ You should answer ‘Yes, I have, No I haven’t’. The students should eventually be able to work out which date you come from. This is also a good opportunity for the time traveller to ask about inventions that they haven’t heard of, eg ‘What is a stamp?’ The game is over when the students guess correctly. Afterwards, let the students play in groups with one member being the time traveller.

Double question relay

This activity gives good practice in the past simple and present perfect. Divide the class into teams of four to six. They prepare personal questions in the two target tenses eg ‘Have you ever ridden a horse?’, ‘Did you go to a restaurant last week?’ This can be done as a team with each producing a two lists, one for each tense. Each team nominates one person to answer the questions. This student, the answerer stands at one end of the room and the rest of his team opposite at the other end of the room. They then ask alternate past and present perfect questions, standing in a line and taking turns to ask a question. Here’s the interesting part: when students ask a present perfect question, they have to run up to the answerer and ask the question, but when they ask past tense questions they must shout it out from the back of the classroom. The team that gets the most questions answered in a time limit is the winner. The questions are asked in different ways to represent the two tenses’ different relations to the present: the answerer is standing in the ‘present’ the rest are in the ‘past’. Explain this or elicit it after they have finished.

Fortune telling

For this you need a pack of picture cards for each pair of students. The pictures should be of people, objects, animals, places. First, student A, the fortune teller gives the cards to student B, who shuffles them and deals out four in a line. These represent form left to right: the past, (something that happened in the past), a recent event (something that has just happened), the present (something that is happening now) and future (something that is going to/will happen.) The fortune teller can interpret the cards in any way they like, the aim is to practise sentences in the four different tenses (past simple, present perfect, present continuous and future) rather than to produce accurate ‘seeings’ -and students should be encouraged to interpret the cards freely. For example, if the first card has a picture of a horse, Student A could say ‘When you were young, you wanted to be a jockey, Right?’ They then swap roles and Student B becomes the fortune teller.

Class reunion

Ask students to write about their plans for the coming year, in groups. They can use future forms such as will, going to and the future continuous) eg ‘This time next year I’ll be working/ I’ll have started working.’ Ask them to read their plans aloud or circulate their papers to the class.

Tell them that you are going to take them exactly one year forward into the future. Do this by asking them to close their eyes, then count to ten and say they have arrived in the future. Tell them they have come back to class for a reunion party. The students imagine they are in the future, and talk about their year, eg ‘I haven’t got married yet, I passed all my exams in the summer, I’ve been abroad’ (ie past and present perfect.) Questions can be asked, based on what individuals said in the first part of the activity: ‘Have you passed your driving test yet?’ ‘Did you get the job you wanted?’ Don’t forget to bring the students back to the present when they have finished!

Temporary activities

Choose several things that can only be done for a short time, eg holding your breath, standing on one leg, holding a pile of books in front of you, sucking a sweet, keeping a table tennis ball in the air with a bat. Ask for volunteers and get them to say what they can do and how long they can do it for. Write these on the board. While they are performing, the rest of the class can time them with watches, and provide a commentary: ‘Simon has been holding his breath for 30 seconds, Fatma has been standing on one leg for a minute.’ It is natural to use present perfect continuous here because of the temporary nature of the activities.

Variation: If the above actions are not suitable, use linguistic activities instead: writing on a certain subject without stopping, writing all the words a student knows beginning with a certain letter, listing areas of vocabulary, eg countries of the world, filling a very small piece of paper with words.

Tense diary

Here present perfect is contrasted with other tenses. First, tell the students to draw a diary page of a weekly diary, showing seven days, with today in the centre, eg if you are doing the activity on Friday, the diary will be: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Write seven activities (eg play tennis, go to dentist, go to cinema, visit aunt etc) on the board and tell to students to write them in their diaries in any order, one per day. The students mingle ask each other questions in present perfect: ‘Have you been to the dentist yet?’ According to their diary the other will answer ‘Yes, I went on (Wednesday) ’ (past) or ‘No, I am going on (Monday). ’(present continuous), or if the activity is listed under today, ‘Yes I have just been to the dentist’, using present perfect. The aim is for each student to find out what everyone in the class (or ten students) has (just) done today.

Chain of actions

First, prepare a set of cards that represent a chain of activities. For example:

Card 1 Put your coat on.
Card 2 When someone puts their coat on, open the door.
Card 3 When someone opens the door, shake hands with the people next to you.
Card 4 When someone shakes hands, say the alphabet.

Prepare ten of these cards and give them to students at random. The students with cards perform the actions, watching carefully for their cues. The rest of the class watch and try to write down the actions in order and who did them. When the actions are finished, elicit them and write them on the board. You can then do a drill with the past continuous. ‘Maria put her coat on. While she was putting her coat on Juan opened the door. While he was opening the door, Ali shook hands with his friends.’ Note: each time the verb that is being interrupted is in the past continuous, the interrupting one is in the past simple.

Rolling drills

You will need one cardboard tube from a paper towel roll for each student. Draw three pictures on one tube, representing a sequence of actions, for example: He’s going to jump over a stream; He’s jumping over a stream; He has just jumped over a stream. (going to, present continuous and present perfect). Draw them in sequence so that only one picture can be seen at any one time when the roll is on the table. Push the tube slowly with your finger, saying the sentence for each picture as it comes round. Do this several times, speeding up the drill, until you say it really quickly. Give out rolls for students to draw their own sequence of pictures. When they have practised them let them swap rolls. The aim is for students to be able to say the sentences more and more quickly, by increasing the rolling speed.

Twenty-one

This well-known card game can be used with more advanced students to practise first and third conditionals. Play in groups of five, with one dealer and two teams of two players. The dealer deals two playing cards to each team. The aim of the game is is to get cards which adds up to exactly 21, or as near as possible, without going above 21. The pairs discuss whether they want another card or not, using first conditional. For example ‘We’ve got eighteen, if we get a three, we’ll have twenty-one, but if we get more than three, we’ll lose.’ The dealer then asks each pair in turn if they would like another card. The extra cards are dealt face up so everyone can see. Finally, after the winner is declared, players can analyse the game as a group. For example, ‘If we had taken the five we would have got twenty three, we’d have lost. If we’d taken the next card, we would have won. If we hadn’t taken that card, we’d have been OK’.

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.