Teacher Discussion Forums

Help! My students (German adults) have problems with the Past Continuous. No matter how well I explain it and no matter how often we exercise it, they just don't get it telling me "why should we learn a tense that doesn't even exist in German?" Does anyone have an idea of how to teach it playfully? A game maybe?

Thanks a lot!!

Why not start with this: 'I was once teaching a bunch of silly German students who said...'.

The template 'was v-ing when/and/so/but etc...' can be used to imagine/think up other equally if not more outrageous or crazy situations.

More TEFL tips soon!

Get a listening from a textbook or make one yourself which gives a story. The text should contain both past progressive and past simple. Before they listen, put up a list of key events on the board. Then have students listen and draw a time line for the complete story in groups (obviously this may require two or three listenings.) The text of the story should be such that students are required to use the tenses to find out whether the events are of a long or short duration, and whether they occur sequentially or at the same time. Alternatively, students could be given pairs of events and asked to draw the timelines; thus, forcing them to listen for whether the events are simultaneous or sequential.

I don't know if is necessarily playfully. (It rather depends on the story.) However, it does force the students to recognise the differences of the tenses, and hence the purpose of past progressive.

Stephen