Past simple (Article for adults)

The Past Simple tense is more useful than the Present Simple and Present Continuous tenses, and it is often argued that it should actually be presented earlier than those two. It can also be seen as a great opportunity to teach loads of useful verbs and time expressions like “two years ago”, “once upon a time, a long time ago” and “the day before yesterday”.

What students will need to know about the Past Simple tense includes?

- Irregular forms

- Pronunciation of regular and irregular forms

- Spelling of regular forms

- When it should be used, mainly meaning time clauses that it can be used with

- Use of the auxiliary “did” in question formation, negatives and short answers

Student problems with the Past Simple tense tend to include:

- Using the Present Simple instead

- Using the Past Perfect tense instead, especially when the action happened a long time ago

- Using the Present Perfect instead of the Past Simple, especially for speakers of languages such as French who have a tense with a similar structure that is used in more or less the same way as the Past Simple in English

- Pronouncing all –ed endings as /ed/, also meaning adding syllables to many verbs that should remain the same length as the Present Simple/ infinitive

- Confusing “before” with “ago” in sentences like “I came here 20 years before” (which would mean twenty years before the previous event I talked about rather than 20 years before now)

- Confusion between particular pairs of past forms, e.g. “felt”/ “fell” and “found”/ “founded”

- Confusion caused by irregular forms with similar spelling and different pronunciation

- Not knowing the meanings of the verbs they are expected to learn the past forms of

- Wasting time, effort and mental capacity on things which are not important such as rarely used verbs which are irregular or differences between British and American English

- Mixing up prepositions in Past Simple time expressions with sentences like “I did it on yesterday” and “I got up in ten o’clock”

Teaching Past Simple pronunciation and spelling rules

The general rule with regular forms is that –ed has a /t/ sound when it follows an unvoiced sound, as after /p/ in “stopped” and after /s/ in “passed”. By contrast, voiced sounds like /b/ in “robbed” and /z/ in “phased out” are followed by a /d/ sound. This is quite easy to explain, as the difference between the final /t/ and the final /d/ sound is also that the former is unvoiced and the latter is voiced. This means that unvoiced sounds are followed by the unvoiced /t/ sound and voiced sounds are followed by the voiced /d/ sound, obviously saving you “switching” your vocal cords on and off. Students can almost always work this out for themselves with some help.

Once students have understood the straightforward rule above, I generally wouldn’t spend any more time on the distinction between /d/ and /t/ pronunciations of –ed. For one thing, students will often reproduce this effect naturally as their fluency improves anyway, as it is easier to speak that way. In addition, this distinction very rarely causes comprehension problems. More important than the distinction between /t/ and/d/ is the fact that neither form increases the number of syllables in the word. This is because in English the number of syllables is the same as the number of vowel sounds and there is no extra vowel sound in /d/ and /t/, leading to one syllable in both “wash” and “washed” and two syllables in both “increase” and “increased”.

In contrast to those two pronunciations, after infinitives ending with /t/ (as in “pasted”) and /d/ (as in “needed”) –ed in pronounced /id/, and this does increase the number of syllables. This is also fairly easy to understand or help students work out for themselves, as it is impossible to pronounce /tt/ in English without an intervening vowel sound.

All this means a fairly large distinction between /id/ with its added syllable and /d/ and /t/ without. This is often worth a bit of classroom time, especially with students who add another syllable to all regular past forms. The teaching ideas further down this article can be used with whatever distinction you decide to focus on, or even all three at the same time if for some reason you decide on that.

Many textbooks deal with the presentation stage by asking students to listen for the pronunciations of the –ed endings in order to classify and then (often) think about why that might be. I believe the first stage of that is either useless or impossible for students most of the time, because if they can hear the difference they can probably produce it sooner or later without the need to study it! It is therefore usually better to give them the pronunciations of some verbs with –ed endings to think about the reasons for, then they can put other verbs into the same categories by a combination of analyzing the last sounds and listening to the pronunciation. Starting with a stage where they listen for the pronunciation can work with /id/ pronunciations, however, especially if you ask them to count syllables rather than think about sounds. The other issue with regular forms is spelling. For example, in the verbs above “stopped” has a doubled consonant before the –ed ending, but “needed” is not “needed”. The simple rule is that short stressed vowel sounds followed by a single consonant need the consonant doubled. This is part of the Magic E spelling rule.

The Magic E rule tells us that a short vowel sound followed by a single consonant and the letter E “says its name”. This can be seen in the pairs fat/ fate, gen/ gene, bit/ bite, dot/ dote and cut/ cute, in which the vowel sounds in the second in each pair is the same as the letters of the alphabet A, E, I, O and U. The same thing would not happen with words with long vowel sounds (including diphthongs) and words with more than one final consonant. For example, in the imaginary pairs batt/ batte, bitt/ bitte etc all the words would be pronounced the same way, and the same would be true of deign/ deigne etc. Magic E is probably the most well-known spelling rule amongst native speakers and the most useful for language learners to study. Less well known is that exactly the same rule is true with words ending in –ing and –ed, leading to the spelling rule for –ed endings explained above.

How to teach irregular Past Simple forms

As with regular forms, the greatest problems with irregular forms like “went” and “bought” tend to be pronunciation and then spelling. As the vast majority of students will take regular –ed endings to be the default mode, students will also need to remember which verbs are irregular, and many students also seem to have a mental subcategory for “verbs which don’t change” such as “put” and “cut”.

The good news about irregular Past Simple forms is that almost all of them are close enough to their infinitive forms that even students who have never seen them before can usually match them up, and this is even easier if the verbs are in context. With classes who have confidence (in themselves and the teacher), it is even possible to start with a game in which they do so, such as the Pelmanism game mentioned in the practice section below.

It is probably even easier for students to guess which of a pair of words in the past and which is the present, again especially if the words are given in at least a sentence of context (something that could be used to present time expressions as well). This means that this could also be done as a game stage before the presentation, in this case with games such as Stations.

How to teach time expressions with Past Simple

It isn’t usually worth actually presenting time clauses with Past Simple until you have Present Perfect to contrast it with, so instead I usually just give them suggested phrases like “two years ago” and “the week before last” in whatever speaking games we are using (see below). Another approach is to do a lesson on prepositions of time like “at 7 o’clock” and “on Monday” but no preposition with “yesterday” and “last year”. Students could be asked to spot the similarities between time expressions with the same preposition (e.g. “on Xmas day”, “on 25 December” and “on Monday” are the same because they are actually the same day) and then classify others in the same way, or this could be combined with past verbs forms in an error correction activity with sentences like “I go there yesterday” and “I went there in last year”.

How to teach Past Simple question formation and negatives

Past Simple questions are easier both than Past Simple positive statements (because the verbs are in the infinitive) and than the Present Simple questions that have probably been presented earlier (because there is no third person S). There is therefore probably no need for specific presentation of this point. The same is true of negatives and short answers. However, this might be a good point to show how “What do you do?” and “What did you do?” are part of the general pattern of “(Wh) + auxiliary verb + S + main verb” that will also be useful later on.