Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

Learning about a thing of the past

— Photo: G. Moorthy

RIGHT TENSE: Students of Government Higher Secondary School, Paravai, engaged in doing a grammar exercise.

MADURAI: Most of the students in general and learners of English as a foreign language in particular have trouble with tenses.

The class VIII students of Government Higher Secondary School, Paravai, were taught to get the right tense by B. Saraswathi, resource person. The Newspaper in Education session held on Wednesday was all about ‘past tense.’ The curiosity to learn better English can be overtly seen in the participation of the students given their suburban and rural background and lesser exposure than their affluent counterparts in urban schools. Concerted efforts from the academia would result in greater changes.

The rule is to remember that if the first verb is in the past tense, then all other verbs must be shifted accordingly.

The students were taught the formation of simple past wherein with regular verbs one has to add an ‘ed’ to the root of a word. For example: He laughed at the joke.

The simple past perfect expresses an action-taking place before a certain time in the past, the children were told.

It is formed by combining the simple past form of ‘to have’ with the simple past form of the main verb. Example: I have received a mail. Simple present perfect is used for describing a past action’s effect on the present.

The students were given an exercise in which they were asked to fill in the blanks with the right tense.

The idea behind the module was to make sure that the children became familiar with the past, present, and future tenses. The RP told the students that reading was the best way to familiarise a student with irregular verbs and getting the tense right.

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