Teaching the Tenses
Today’s Feature Post is by CANE regular Ruth Breindel, who shares a PowerPoint that she uses to help students understand tense.
I have found that some students donโt understand time โ how the various tenses interact with each other.ย Here is one way I show them, using a PowerPoint of a Christmas tree – seeย tree tensesย here!
How to use this:
- After you have explained and explained and explained how the tenses relate, and they still donโt get it, show them the slides.
- They are arranged so that the time sequence is: Pluperfect, Perfect, Imperfect, Present, Future and Future Perfect.ย Note too that the tenses are not put in a straight line, but in a โswoopโ down and up.ย For some unknown reason, this does help some students to understand the relationship better.
- With the first presentation of each tense, there is a time assigned to it, so students get the idea of the passage of time.
- The future perfect, being an โunrealโ tense, is shown last, as an amalgam of the future and the perfect.ย Personally, I tell my students that they may never use the future perfect in a sentence, because Iโve found that they will translate the perfect (amaverunt โ they loved) as the future perfect (they will have loved) just because they are so enamoured of the future perfect!ย I think this is because the โeruntโ ending on the perfect looks just too much like the future.ย Iโd rather have them wrong 1% of the time by using the perfect for the future perfect, than wrong 99% of the time by using the future perfect for the perfect!
- I tried to inject some humor into this, too:
- the imperfect has a broken ornament, making it โimperfectโ
- the present tense is a present under the tree
Feel free to modify this โ add color, or Latin, or whatever!