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This unit explains form, use, and teaching ideas of past tenses. There are four past tenses: past simple, past continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous. Past simple is used to express actions that were completed at a definite time in the past. The form can be affirmative (I worked), negative (I did not work ), and question form (Did you work?). Form of irregular verbs changes (see to saw?). The only way to know all the irregular verbs is to learn them, there is no other rule. Teaching ideas for learning irregular verb would be card games or memory games when students match the verb with its past simple form. Other ideas for teaching past simple tense is cutting up a picture and asking the students to put the story in order and make statements about it using the correct tense. The main use of past continuous is to express an action that was in progress at a particular time in the past. It is formed with auxiliary verb be (was/were) and present participle (adding ing to the verb). Teaching ideas would be creating a detective game where student guess what happened and ask questions, telling stories or writing journals. Past perfect is used for actions that occurred before other actions in the past. Example would be ?When I arrived the concert had started? (subject + had + past participle), to create negative form we add ?not? after ?had? and for a question we just ad ?had? at the beginning of the sentence (Had you studied English before you moved to New York?). Teaching ideas would be story telling and writing, maybe using a combination of tenses. This activity would be appropriate for more advanced students, for beginners other activities would be more appropriate, like the use of pictures (different people are doing different things, student make questing about what people in the picture were doing before the picture was taken). Past perfect continuous is not used or taught very often and students may have difficulties while learning. We use past perfect continuous when trying to explain two actions when one is continuing at another point in the past. The example would be ?When I arrived he had been cooking? (subject + had + been +verb + ing). With negative we just add ?not? after ?have?, for question form we put ?had? at the beginning of the sentence. An idea for teaching would be asking a student to give a statement and other students ask why the action happened. From this unit I learned the use and form of past tenses and how challenging can be to explain the rules and choose the right activities for students to learn. With more advanced students we can use activities that combine more tenses and students try to come up with stories. For beginners pictures would be more appropriate. Also activities that use only one tense and the goal is to come up with just one sentence would be better.
