I've just sent out Volume 2 to subscribers of my ezine, ESL Teaching Tips. Volume 2 has "Cheat Sheets" for all verb tenses. Teachers and tutors can use them as reminders for themselves and also as handouts for their more advanced students.
If you haven't yet signed up for my ezine, you can do so on my ESL Teaching Tips sign-up page.
When you sign up, you'll get a free ebook with 27 worksheets for the Simple Present Tense.
Even for the most advanced ESL students, propositions can always use more practice. Many verbs are (usually) followed by certain prepositions. Some even entirely change the meaning of a verb by turning it into a phrasal verb.
ESL learners just have to memorize most prepositions, especially those that follow certain verbs (and even more so for those that create phrasal verbs). Some prepositions can be used interchangeably depending on the situation. This just adds more confusion for people learning English.
Prepositions of place, perhaps, are among the most consistent (that is, they have fewer exceptions). Prepositions of place are almost logical, if you can understand the preposition on its own.
To help reinforce students' learning of prepositions, you can always use ESL preposition worksheets. There's at least one at Free ESL Worksheets. This is a link to a page with worksheets on my ESL website.
The first verb tenses to teach ESL students are the Simple Present and the Present Continuous (also called the Present Progressive). Although a thorough lesson plan teaching these two tenses will include the functions of the two tenses, ESL learners will need practice to determine when to use the Simple Present or the Present Continuous.
ESL cloze exercises can be used for student practice or for testing the student. Below is a cloze exercise using the Simple Present and Present Continuous.
You can also download this exercise as a pdf file. You will be sent to a "file hosting" site and you can download the pdf version from there. Click the "Click here to start download" button.
As discussed in Fundamentals of Teaching Verb Tenses, ESL students must know five forms of each verb in order to thoroughly conjugate a verb. Students must know the following verb usages: affirmative, negative, yes/no questions, short answers and WH- questions.
Here is a thorough verb conjugation for the Simple Present verb “to walk.” Each sentence is missing one word. Click here for a pdf version of this ESL cloze exercise. Or click here for the exercise in a table format. You'll be sent to a "file hosting" site and you can download the pdf version from there. Click the "Click here to start download" button.
“What is a cloze exercise?” A cloze exercise is basically a fill-in-the blanks exercise. It can be used for ESL exercises or as an ESL quiz or test.
ESL cloze exercises can be used to help reinforce (and test) student’s learning of verbs, articles, prepositions, pronouns, etc. Basically, cloze exercises can be used for all grammar lessons, teaching any part of speech, or for vocabulary reinforcement.
ESL cloze exercises can be used with single sentences or with whole paragraphs or larger passages of writing. The instructions usually say something like, “Fill in the blanks with the correct words.” Or if you are specifically testing a particular part of speech, the directions might say something like, “Fill in the blanks with the correct prepositions.”
Here are a few examples of cloze sentences for the Present Perfect tense:
1. She __________ never __________ to Germany.
2. They __________ always __________ each other.
3. I __________ __________ to Mexico many times.
4. __________ you ever __________ squid?
5. __________ she __________ the movie yet?
You can see from these sample ESL cloze sentences that the student has more than one choice for the main verb. He or she just has to make sure that the correct form of the verb (the past participle) is used. The “helping” verb can only be “has” or “have.” It depends on the subject.
In short, there can be some flexibility in the answers of a cloze exercise, especially for advanced ESL students. I would limit the possible answers of ESL cloze exercises for beginning students. You can do this by providing a list of the possible answers and instruct the student that each answer can only be used once.
I met with one of my advanced students today. We are reviewing the Future Perfect and Future Perfect Progressive tenses. At our last session, we finished the chapter in Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar
She came back today with the ESL worksheets incomplete. She told me that she had a hard time completing the exercises. It turns out that the exercises I gave her are from the same source I had trouble with the other day for one of my beginning students. Some of the blanks required use of the Simple Future, instead of the Perfect tenses, but the directions said only Future Perfect or Future Perfect Progressive.
I really, really must review the ESL worksheets and exercises I get from the web before I give them to my students!
We were able to use this experience as a learning tool, but she still needs help learning this tense. I'm going to use some material from Swan's Practical English Usage
I don't think that many English as a Second Language students get much practice with the Future tenses. They are often among the last grammar points taught, and frankly, native English speakers don't use the Future tenses as much as we use other tenses, especially the past. I think this probably says more about how we live our lives than anything else.
Today, I met with a beginning level ESL student. Her homework for the weekend included a cloze exercise (a "filling in the blanks" exercise) using the Present Perfect. Before we started correcting the exercise, she asked me if all the blanks were supposed to be filled in using the Present Perfect. I said, "yes." When we started going over the answers, I realized that the exercises actually required using either the Present Perfect or the the Simple Past. Oops.
I apologized profusely to the student for giving her the wrong instructions. However, we were able to make the corrections together and this turned out to be another learning opportunity. I was also able to see her thought processes in determining whether the correct verb tense was the Present Perfect or the Simple Past.
I got the ESL grammar exercise from one of the of the sites that I use regularly for exercises. (I had copied and pasted it to Microsoft Word on my laptop (giving all the appropriate credit to the website).) It said that the exercise was for the Present Perfect. Other exercises specified other tenses, so I made the assumption that the whole exercise labeled "Present Perfect" was only using the Present Perfect.
This is not the first time I discovered an error in an ESL lesson I got from the Internet. Moral of the story: review the exercise before you assign it to your student!
