Korean Job Discussion Forums

[jdog2050]

Anyone got a sure fire way to help kids remember their tenses at least 70% of the time?

[aka Dave]

I tell them to proof read their essays and mechanically remember HE SHE IT ----S.

I teach Univ. students and agreement errors are common. There is no sure fire way as this is hard wired early on in language learning (according to my boss, who's a linguistics prof.)

[pootle]

This may not be relevant to Uni students but in my middle schools I've created and photocopied verb tables because the kids don't have dictionaries or any form of grammar book.

The most common errors are 3rd person singular and use of the simple past. Since the kids don't seem to know the language of grammar (past participle, infinitive etc.) then I have spent some time on this - it's easier to teach grammar if they understand the terminology. In one of my schools we went right back to basics and I taught noun, verb, adjective, adverb etc. so that they understand these terms and we can use them as a basis for sentence construction. It seems that Korean English teachers focus on set phrases and don't teach the students how to construct their own phrases.

[blackjack]

[Yu_Bum_suk]

First, for conversation, we should remember to focus just on the seven most important tenses (simple past, present, future; past and present continuous; and past and present perfect) and not worry about the others. At some point they'll need to understand the difference between active and passive - this comes up in grade two MS for most students - but to start with try to keep everything in the active voice.

Once we know what to aim for there are a number of excercises we can do. One is to get them to change sentences between past, present, and future. Another is to get them practicing past tense forms and past participles immediately after teaching / drilling them. Above all it's important that we stress to keep it as simple as possible and focus mostly on fluency, only correcting mistakes on certain set excercises. If students make mistakes with tenses and conjucations but you can still understand exactly what they say this should be considered adequate for conversational purposes. Just getting them to used to using the verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives they already know in subject-verb-object format is a huge step forward.