Highly Irregular: An activity to practice the past tense of irregular verbs
In a recent YouTube lesson on verb tenses, I decided to review the forms of the simple past. The series targets intermediate and advanced students, so one might question the depth of my review, which includes the spelling and pronunciation rules as well as practice with some irregular verbs. However, I’ve seen and heard upper level students make basic mistakes, so I felt the review was appropriate. Some reach a high level of fluency without ever really realizing, for example, that the -ed ending has three different pronunciations.
With this mindset, I also created a simple conversation-based game to review irregular verbs in the simple past. The game is light and fast-paced without being a monotonous drill. Upper level students will have to recall many irregular verbs and test their creativity to compose sentences with those verbs on the spot. Please see my Highly Irregular_handout .
Explore posts in the same categories: GrammarTags: English With Jennifer, irregular verbs, Jennifer Lebedev, JenniferESL, past tense, simple past
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October 21, 2012 at 4:29 pm
Great post, thanks very much! I’m an English teacher in English language summer schools all over the world, so I know how hard people find irregular verbs. I’ll definitely be trying this activity out with my students!
Monica V
October 22, 2012 at 10:30 am
Thanks for checking it out, Monica.