Teaching is what I'm here to do. Floods, thunderstorms, the odd news report of a lion attacking cattle on the edge of a town... those are just the perques.
I could see that most of my students don't have the fundamentals of grammar down, so that was where I started. - what's a noun, etc. Then subject-verb-object. Next came how to parse verbs.
I started with pretty simple verb charts:
| Simple | Progressive / Participle | |
Present |
go |
going |
Past |
went |
gone |
Then moved on to sentence charts:
| verb: Go | affirmative | negative | question |
BE |
I am going | I am not going | Am I going? |
| She is going | She is not going | Is she going? | |
DO |
I do go | I don't go | Do I go? |
| She does go | She doesn't go | Does she go? | |
HAVE |
I have gone | I haven't gone | Have I gone? |
| She has gone | She hasn't gone | Has she gone? |
Then once everyone is (or seems) comfortable wit that, move on to doing the same thing but in the past.
| verb: Go | affirmative | negative | question |
BE |
I was going | I was not going | Was I going? |
| She was going | She was not going | Was she going? | |
DO |
I did go | I didn't go | Did I go? |
| She did go | She didn't go | Did she go? | |
HAVE |
I had gone | I hadn't gone | Had I gone? |
| She had gone | She hadn't gone | Had she gone? |
I always referred back to the verb chart to show which quadrant that the verb form was coming from, and how it was consistent. Once everyone seemed OK with that, THEN I pointed out that we had never used the simple past, and explained how to use it with only affirmative statements where we had previously used "did."
Suffice to say, this was a lot of work for the learners, and much of it was being given to them as homework.
One of the girls didn't do the homework (actually more than a few didn't do it, but this one had been making the effort and stopped). When I asked her why, she said that she didn't understand English and it was too much work for something she didn't understand.
I told her that if she could understand how the verbs worked (and we had done 3 examples in class), then English would get a lot easier. I told her that it was a lot of writing, but that she would see the pattern of how the verbs were working and this would help her.
She agreed and the next day had done the work. From that point on, she has been a very focussed student. Today, when we were dealing with passive sentences and how you need a direct object, she was leaning in to better see the board (she sits at the back, don't they all?). I could see that she understood what we were talking about.
She's raising her hand and more importantly, so are the girls around her.
It's a small victory, but it's those that keep you going.
— SGP
