Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence 213
In the sentence, ‘Yesterday afternoon Rex went to the supermarket’, the
subject is Rex not yesterday afternoon, which appears first in the line up.
In this case it’s important to show the connection between Rex and the
verb – Rex is the person who went.
✓ Students repeat the subject word instead of using a subject pronoun. So
for a student, Rex’s story may continue: ‘After Rex finished in the super-
market Rex walked in the park. Rex got a sandwich in the café and Rex
ate it on the grass.’It’s therefore important for students to practise replacing the name of
the subject word with a pronoun once they’re clear about who or what
that is. As students progress, you also need to point out that later in the
sentence it’s possible to leave the subject word or pronoun out, as long
as it’s there in the first part and the meaning is obvious. So they can say,
‘Rex got a sandwich in the café and ate it on the grass’ instead of ‘Rex
got a sandwich in the café, and Rex ate it on the grass’.Activating verbs
A verb is a word that describes an action. It can be manipulated into different
tenses to show when something happened. When you talk about a verb in its
original, infinitive form, you put ‘to’ in front of it.Finding verb forms
A main verb can be manipulated into different forms to show which tense it’s
in or what purpose it serves in a particular sentence. (I talk about auxiliary
verbs in the next section.)Verb forms are:✓ Infinitive: The infinitive form of the verb is the original form before it
changes to make a tense. It’s the form with ‘to’ in front of it, for example
‘to play’. You usually need to know this form to look up the meaning in
the dictionary, although you cut the ‘to’ off.
✓ Gerund or present participle: This is the verb with ‘ing’ on the end. So
the gerund of ‘to play’ is ‘playing’.
✓ Past simple: The past simple is a particular tense that describes com-
pleted actions in the past. Some verbs have regular endings in the past
simple. You add ‘ed’ to the end (or just ‘d’ to a verb ending with ‘e’
already). For example, the past simple of ‘play’ is ‘played’.
Many verbs are irregular though, so they change a lot in this tense. For
example: say /said.