ESL Speakers Using the Past Perfect

The Past Perfect grammar tense is one of the past tenses that my ESL students regularly avoid using. It is one of the more difficult tenses for students to master because it includes a helping verb, plus a past participle. And if you add an adverb, keeping the order straight is always a challenge.

The Past Perfect tense is used to talk about the past when there are two past tense events, or one past tense event and a particular time in the past. For example, "I had given up before she arrived."

I think the other reason that ESL speakers avoid using the Past Perfect tense is because you really can express all that you need to express by using the Simple Past plus words like "before" and "after."

Learning the Past Perfect just allows an ESL speaker to more fully learn and use the language.

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