At 6/26/00, Ruth wrote:

>So many times I want to ask things like, "Just how DO you conjugate a verb?"

I was amazed, as I looked through my mail this last few minutes, how many
people commented on your question without attempting to answer it.

In my French class, when we were taught different verb forms and different
verb tenses, my teacher would put a chart on the board for each tense.  It
would have two columns and 3 rows.  The column headings would be for
singular, and the second would be for plural.  The three row headings would
be for 1st person, 2nd person, and third person.  If your e-mail lines up
the same as mine, it would look something like this:


                                        singular                                        plural

1st person              (I)                                             (we)
2nd person              (you)                                   (you)
3rd person              (he/she/it)                             (they)


We would then fill in the appropriate verb forms for whatever tense we were
working on.  In English, you is the same for singular and plural, but in
French, it is different.  I simply explain that to the kids, and they know
that the two forms for "you" will always be the same.

For the word be, in the present tense, the chart would look like this:


                                        singular                                        plural

1st person:             I am                                    we are
2nd person:             you are                                 you are
3rd person:             (s)he is                                        they are

Although I did talk to my high school students about this (freshman), I
never had done anything like it myself outside of a foreign language class,
and don't consider it a major task that kids should learn.  However, it
does sometimes help them to analyze what they are doing when they write
sentences.  Once they figure out how the different slots work, they can
simply think to themselves how they would say something in a formal setting
(for those who typically use a non-standard dialect, but are familiar with
how their teachers usually talk), and they can generally figure out which
words go in which slots.


They do tend to get past tense and past participles mixed up, especially if
they speak a non-standard dialect.  Conjugating verbs in past tense, and
also in the perfect and progressive tenses (especially past perfect and
past progressive), comparing the feel of these different kinds of tenses
and how they affect the meaning, can help kids make sense of why using a
participle instead of past tense can be inappropriate in formal english.

As far as the perfect and progressive tenses, I always forget which is
which (have to look it up in my textbooks, but generally think that the
ability to use them is more important than knowing the names), but they are
the forms of verbs that use "be" and "have":  I am writing, I was writing,
I will be writing, I had written, I have written, I had been writing, I
have been writing, etc.

I tend to use a lot of visual aids in my teaching, and try to connect what
I teach to things they are already familiar with.  I also tend to use a lot
of sentence structure imitation in my teaching, which helps build up an
implicit understanding of language in a playful manner.  I think that the
formal sentence diagramming in textbooks is too complicated (I also never
did that in school) to teach the kinds of things I teach, but I have used
an adapted form of it to show relationships of thought units in a sentence,
especially with compound structures.


Susan Mari Witt



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