Page 249 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
✓ The simple tenses don’t use the auxiliary verbs ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ with the main verb. The continuous and perfect tenses use these auxiliary (or helping) verbs in their structure. For example, ‘I drink tea’ is in the pres- ent simple. ‘I drank tea’ is in the past simple tense and ‘I will drink’ is the future simple tense.
✓ The continuous tenses always include ‘to be’ in one form or another (is, are was, were and so on – I go through ‘to be’ in Chapter 15) and another verb ending with ‘ing’ (called a gerund). So the sentence ‘I am eating now’ is in the present continuous tense. ‘I was eating’ is in the past con- tinuous tense and ‘I will be eating’ is in the future continuous tense. In each case ‘to be’ and a gerund form part of the structure of the tense.
✓ The perfect tenses always include ‘to have’ in some way (has, have, had) and another verb that’s a past participle. So the sentence ‘I have eaten’ is the present perfect tense. ‘I had eaten’ is in the past perfect tense and ‘I will have eaten’ is the future perfect tense. In each case the structure of the tense contains ‘to have’ and a past participle.
There may seem to be an endless number of tenses to remember, but actually there are only twelve and you only need to teach them one at a time.
In Table 16-1 all the tense labels are set out using the first person ‘I’ and the verb ‘to eat’, which is an irregular verb, to make model sentences.
Table 16-1
Simple
Continuous
Perfect
Perfect continuous
Past
I ate
I was eating
I had eaten
I had been eating
Tense Names
Present
I eat
I am eating
I have eaten
I have been eating
Future
I will eat
I will be eating
I will have eaten
I will have been eating
Although the table includes all the tenses, I cover other grammatical struc- tures such as ‘conditionals’ in Chapter 17.
In Table 16-1, I use the subject pronoun I in each sentence. Fortunately, in English the grammar changes very little when you use the other subject pro- nouns. This is much easier than in other languages so don’t be surprised if students seem to be overcomplicating the matter. They’re usually translating.