232 Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
A typical context for this tense is a story about last weekend or your last holi-
day: Last summer, I went to Florida with my family. It was really hot and I got a
good tan.
The past simple tense is quite easy with regular verbs. Students can easily
remember to add ‘ed’ or ‘d’ to the end of a verb.
Don’t get too comfortable though! The ‘ed’ ending can be pronounced in differ-
ent ways. Just compare these three verbs – looked, played and waited – and
notice that you pronounce the ‘ed’ as t/, /d/ and /id/respectively, although the
spelling is the same.
There’s also an array of irregular verbs that students just have to learn by
heart. Course books or learners’ dictionaries usually include a table of verbs
at the back of the book and these tables list the past simple in the second
column. Verbs such as ‘to drink’ and ‘to understand’ are irregular because
they change drastically. Instead of adding ‘... ed’, you change them to drank
and understood respectively.
Remembering a Moment in the Past
With the past continuous tense you can speak about a particular moment in
the past.
All continuous tenses include the verb ‘to be’ and a gerund (a verb that ends
with ing). In this case the verb ‘to be’ is in the past (was or were).
I/he/she/it was singing.
You/we/they were singing.
In the negative form you add not or n’t (wasn’t and weren’t) and for question
forms you put was and were before the subject pronoun (words like I, you,
and they). For example: Wer e they singing? No they weren’t singing.
If a detective wanted to interview someone about a theft that happened the
night before, she may ask, ‘What were you doing at 8.30 p.m. last night?’
Whodunnit games are a great way to practise this tense as students can come
up with alibis in the past continuous.
Or perhaps two actions happened in the past but one action interrupted the
other one. For example: ‘At 8.30 p.m. I started making dinner. At 8.35 p.m.
my neighbour came round’. The typical way to express that is by combining
past continuous, often with ‘while’ and ‘when’, and past simple: While I was
making dinner, my neighbour came round.
