Personal Past Perfect: Using a Personal Story to Authentically Model a Tense

Peter Gyulay, Australia

Peter Gyulay has been working as an English language teacher for ten years. He has taught in Korea, China and his home country of Australia. He has an interest in Critical ELT, EAP and the philosophy of education. E-mail: p.gyulay@gmail.com

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Introduction
Lesson
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Past perfect is one of the most troublesome tenses for English language learners to grasp, and even more so, to use. There are a number of reasons for this. One is the form itself, which is similar to present perfect and hence sometimes confused with it. Another reason is that students over use it and use it to refer to previous main events in a narrative, when they should simply use the past simple. As Swan (2005 p. 397) puts it, “the meaning of past perfect is 'earlier past'”. He explains that we use the tense to make clear that something had already occurred before the time period we are talking about. In addition, as Parrot (2010 p. 228) points out, while learners can understand that the past perfect is used to refer to previous actions, they are often not aware of other factors that are involved in using past perfect. To me, it is important that students are able to differentiate main events from background events: past simple being used to refer to the main events, and past perfect referring to the previous but connected events which provide background information.

Another relevant point to teaching past perfect, and any grammatical point, is in regards to finding content that both engages and models the target language. A common issue when using a course book is that many of the topics in the book can become rather trivial and lacking in the needed realism which is required to spark and maintain meaningful communication. Students can often feel that they are going through the motions of using their English instead of engaging in real and purposeful communication. To remedy this, teachers can rely less on the course book and more on the real experience of both the students and themselves, thus providing the ideal texts.

According to Nunan (1991) authentic texts are advantagous because they provide natural language and realistic language models. Furthermore, authentic materials are said to: be interesting and motivating, provide real information on culture, provide exposure to real language, cater to learners' needs, and make teachers more creative - through the necessity of creating tasks around authentic material (Peacock 1997 in Davies, D., & Pearse, E. 2000). Moreover, according to Crawford (1995, p. 26), as well as providing cultural richness they help to develop strategies for coping with input outside the classroom.

With these points in mind about past perfect and authentic texts, I would like to outline a past perfect lesson which I have taught. The lesson was taught to a class of intermediate to upper-intermediate students.

Lesson

Firstly, prepare students to listen to a personal story. In my case it was a mysterious travel story, so the following questions are appropriate to lead students into the topic:

1. Do you like travelling?
2. What are the best places you've been to?
3. Where would you like to travel to in the future?

After the students have discussed the above questions, tell them that you are going to tell them a personal story. They need to answer the question: what strange thing happened? Here is the story I told my students:

When I was 20 years old I went travelling around South America for 5 months. I started my trip in Argentina and went all the way up to Colombia and back to Argentina. When I was in Ecuador I was walking down the street in a tiny town called Baños. To my surprise I walked straight towards someone I knew. It was my friend's older brother. I had lived next to him when I was growing up in Newcastle, Australia. He was also travelling around South America. What was more amazing was that I had had a dream about him a month before I saw him in Ecuador. We arranged to meet that night. We went to a restaurant and then went to see an active volcano.

The students then discuss in pairs what was strange about the story and then briefly give feedback as a class. Then draw a timeline on the board and ask the students to listen to the story again and write the actions on a timeline in their notebooks in the order they actually happened – not in the order they were told. Task them to write the actions in the infinitive.

Tell the story again, have the students check their timelines together and then gain feedback from the class and write the actions on the board in the correct order. Then ask the students to circle the main actions in the story and underline the previous actions. Depending on the class, you may need to elicit and demonstrate a couple of these before the students do it themselves. After the students check in pairs, ask the class for the main actions and previous actions from the story and circle/underline them.

Now tell the students that you will tell the story one more time and that they need to write the actions in the verb forms they were told in (but you do not need to tell the students the name of the tenses just yet). Pair and class feedback will follow. Now explicitly focus on the past perfect form i.e. had + past participle in contrast to the past simple. The students should now have an adequate understanding of the meaning and form of past perfect and can begin to experiment with using it.

Task the students to think of a significant experience they have had. Perhaps they can try to put an adjective to the experience e.g. strange, exciting, surprising, unlucky etc. They then need to think of some previous events that were connected to that experience. If they can't, then they may need to think of a different experience which does have previous events connected to it.

When they have an idea in their minds, they need to draw a timeline and write all the main actions in the story using the infinitive, circling them. Then they need to add the previous actions and underline them. They can then write the full story, writing the circled actions in past simple and the underlined actions in past perfect. Monitor the students and offer help where necessary. When the students are finished, have them exchange stories with another student and check the verb tenses. If there is any confusion between students about which tense to use, offer assistance.

Depending on the class size and dynamics, you can either post the stories on the walls around the room and everyone can walk around and read them or the students could read them aloud to the class.

Conclusion

This proved to be a very engaging, interactive and effective lesson in which students gained proficiency in relating a significant life event using some past perfect sentences. By using a personal story, the teacher is able to model language which naturally exhibits the target language and engages the students in authentic communication. Additionally, using a timeline with circled main events and underlined previous events is an effective way to make the distinction between past simple and past perfect more salient.

References

Crawford, J. (1995). The role of materials in the language classroom: Finding the balance. TESOL in Context, 5 (1), 25-33.

Davies, D., & Pearse, E. (2000). Success in English Teaching. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Parrot, M. (2010). Grammar for English Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Nunan, D. (1991). Language Teaching Methodology: A Textbook for Teachers. Prentice Hall: New York.

Swan, M. (2005). Practical English Usage. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

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