Page 260 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

past perfect continuous tenses.
Present
Chapter 16: Feeling Tense? Sorting Out Verb Tenses
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Here’s a context you can use to teach this tense. Show or draw a picture of a boy returning home in wet football gear. Tell your students it happened yester- day. Ask them to suggest why he was wet. Encourage the answer ‘He came home wet because he had been playing football in the rain’. Then establish how long it takes to play a match to highlight the duration of time needed.
Draw a timeline to illustrate, such as the one in Figure 16-2.
Figure 16-2:
Timeline showing
actions in playing football in the rain
the past XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX simpleand Past
came home wet
X
Students need plenty of practice to get this tense right. The past perfect con- tinuous tense contains three verbs in a row, which is tricky for them, and com- munication doesn’t tend to be hindered unduly if you get it wrong. However, at upper-intermediate level students should be aiming to go beyond basic com- munication so don’t let them settle for past continuous.
Expressing the Future
Learners find expressing ideas about the future in English very odd and this isn’t wholly unreasonable. When people express other tenses they generally add something to the end of a verb. Take ‘to wait’ as an example:
Present simple Present continuous Past simple
He waits.
He is waiting. He waited.
In many languages tenses work in this way and also have a special ending that indicates the future, so students may be expecting a new ending. However, in English the structure is rather different. We use another word or words before the main verb. For example:
I will wait.
I am going to wait.