Simple Past Tense Lesson Plan and Rationale
Rationale
Knowles (as cited by Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999) argued that in order to
differentiate between present and past tenses, this requires the understanding of the “core
meaning” of the forms. Knowles indicates that the core meaning of simple past consists of two
notions: the past tense adds the sense of “remoteness” and its simple aspect adds the idea of
completion. As explained in The Grammar Book by Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999), an
event can be remote in time with a time indicator “In 1987, last year, etc”, or a recent one “I
finished my term paper”.
According to Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999), there are six different usages of
the simple past tense where the notions of completeness and remoteness apply:
a. A certain completed event or an action that happened in the past:
e.g. I went to the movies last weekend.
b. Actions repeated regularly in the past as habits:
e.g. I went to the movies every weekend in the winter.
c. An action that has a duration in the past and does not apply to the past anymore:
e.g. My brother lived in Brazil for 10 years.
d. With past state verbs:
e.g. He remained silent.
e. With imaginative conditionals that occur in the subordinate clause with the reference
to present time:
e.g. If I had enough money, I would buy a mansion.
f. For social and politeness reasons to be used in the present time:
Simple Past Tense Lesson Plan and Rationale
e.g. Did you want a cup of tea and chat for a bit?
In the “Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English” book by
Biber, Conrad, and Leech (2002), another usage of the simple past tense was mentioned
which referred to the use of the past tense for reported speech.
In this lesson, the students need to understand the meaning and the different
usages of the simple past. They need to know the structure and how to form sentences
and questions in simple past. They also need to be familiar with the tense and able to use
it orally and in written language. However, teaching tenses in general is challenging as
Eli Hinkel (year), explained on her website “Verb tenses are difficult for most ESL
students, especially for students whose native languages do not have elaborated tense
systems”. This definitely applies to the class I designed. My target group are 25 students
who are in their preparatory year in a private college. Therefore, the class is considered
an EFL preparatory English course. When I designed this lesson plan I wanted to
combine the environment of both an ESL intensive course and an EFL course for
academic purposes. Why?
At the beginning of this plan, I chose to have a warm up activity by making the
students watch a clip from the show “FRIENDS". Using such a visual method will help
introduce students to the culture of the native speakers of English especially in an EFL
classroom setting. As Stempleski (1987) suggests “a rich and exciting source of video
software for EFL/ESL classes is authentic material.”
The purpose eventually is to
introduce them to the target structure “simple past” by grasping their attention to what to
be addressed more as the lesson progresses.
Simple Past Tense Lesson Plan and Rationale
The guided practice that will follow is intended to raise students’ attention but not
formally introduce them to the form of the simple past tense, as this is called Noticing and
Consciousness Raising. Ellis and Schmidt (as cited in Hinkel and Fotos, year) stated “Once
learner’s consciousness of a target language feature has been raised through formal instruction or
through continued communicative exposure, the learner often tend to notice the feature in
subsequent input”.
As a result, students will observe a change in the verbs when asked to underline them and they
will also notice the bolded endings to make them more salient. This will help them to broaden
their observation. This technique follows the inductive approach. Smith suggested “An inductive
approach to teaching the form of English tense-combination is to provide students with
naturalistic data in which the input has somehow been enhanced”. (as cited by Celce-Murcia &
Larsen-Freeman, 1999, p.129). This approach is on the contrary of the deductive approach where
teaching grammar structures is more traditional and relies mainly on dictating these rules. I
adapted this strategy from the teaching suggestions in “The Grammar Book” by Celce-Murcia &
Larsen-Freeman for teaching the form of the simple past tense.
At this stage of the lesson, and after accomplishing the goal of grasping student’s
attention, I chose to introduce the structure of the simple past tense using another technique of
visual aids and props which is PowerPoint slides. First, I used the past tense timeline which I
adapted from “Understanding and using English grammar, 3rd Edition” By Betty Azar and
Stacey A. Hagen (year) which I found to be a helpful tool for me to illustrate to students the
meaning of the past tense and where it occurs in a timeline. The main thing was to introduce
explicitly the new addition to the main verb which is the suffix (-ed). The other structures of not
placement “sentential negation” (did not) and the formation of questions with the auxiliary (did)
Simple Past Tense Lesson Plan and Rationale
and verb to be “was and were” in their past forms followed the main affirmative structure which
in that order seems logical to acquire the new rule. Students struggle at this point is possible to
comprehend the new structures, but with the expect note taking at such setting of classroom and
later exercise should help addresses these difficulties. (Not clear; what do you want to say?)
After the introduction of structure, I chose to design another guided practice where
students can test their understanding of the new forms without necessarily memorizing structure.
Students were asked to work on an exercise where they are supposed to fill in the blank with the
correct form of the verb in the past simple tense, and to underline the time signals to understand
their importance as indicator of tense. I chose this exercise because it will help students to
associate meaning with form at this stage while focus is mainly on the form. The focus of form
approach introduced in this exercise combines formal instruction and communicative language
use (Eli, 2002). Student will also be introduced to the irregular verbs as a new vocabulary and to
the rule of adding an (-ed) to the verb. By going through a good amount of examples student will
be able to know few of these verbs to utilize throughout the lesson.
In the final