Teaching Simple Past Tense in Local School

In previous post, I have specified to write my experience while teaching Past Tense. Before I start explaining how I teach student, I believe it is good idea to have the same perception about Education. In my opinion, Education is an effort to educate that has purpose building intelligent, usually through family and school. I think that education is a never ending process that begins with the socialization of the child and continues through all of adult life. I believe “Education process could be done in every places”. It means that education can be carried out both inside and outside classroom, like at home with family, following training and taking Course. Kinds of education often are found and followed deliberately or in-deliberately. They are formal, informal and non formal education.
Formal Education is more familiar with schooling system education. It has standardization like grade, curriculum, and qualification of its elemental management, age, grade of ability, and procedure of evaluation, presentation of materials and exercises and schedule of holiday. It can be concluded that formal education has administrative legality, tighter institute management, and organization qualification. Formal education has certain time for studying that is decided by Department of Education. The example of Formal education are School and university.
Non-formal Education. Non-formal education usually offer special education which has sorter time and teach student with various skills. The example of Non-formal education are courses and training.
The last kind is Informal Education. It is different with both of kind of education above. Informal education has unstructured organization, has no grade and without curriculum. The real examples are education by natural effect of family function, mass media, religious ceremony and participation in an organization. The experience is gotten involuntarily.
So, what is the connection between Education and Past Tense. Simple, I am a teacher whom teach student at school and It mean I have to teach student with the standard of ‘Formal Education’. I have to explain the topic clearly based on the curriculum and it has to be easy to understand. I have explained the methods using to teach my students in previous article (read: My Methods in Teaching English for student)

Simple Past Tense

Definition of Simple Past Tense: it indicates an activity or situation began and ended at a particular time in the past (English Grammar; Betty Schrampfer Azzar).

The Pattern of Simple Past Tense

There are two pattern used while teaching simple past tense. They are nominal and Verbal sentences:

Nominal Sentence

A nominal sentence is a sentence that it’s predicate is ‘not verb’ but adjective or noun.  Nominal sentence is divided into Affirmative, Negative and interrogative forms.

1. Affirmative Form
   It use pattern: “Subject + Be + Complement.
   
   ’Be’ for singular person:
   ’I/He/She/It’ using ‘was’ and ‘You’ using ‘were’.
   
   ’Be’ for plural subject
   ’We/You/They’ using ‘were’
   
   Example:
   - I was a student of university years ago.
   - John was hungry an hour ago
   - We were very busy last night
2. Negative Form
   The Pattern is: Subject + be + not + Complement.
   Example:
   - I was not a student of university years ago.
   - John was not hungry an hour ago.
   - We are not very busy today
3. Interrogative Form
   Pattern: Be + Subject + Complement.
   Example:
   - Was John hungry an hour ago?
   - Were You a student of university years ago?
   - Were We very busy last night?

Verbal Sentence

Verbal sentence is a sentence which it’s predicate is ‘verb’. The form of verbal sentences are as follows:

1. Affirmative Form
   Pattern: Subject + Verb 2nd form
   Example:
   - We watched television last night.
   - I studied English last week
   - They went to the zoo two days ago.
   
   # Special Note :
   Regular verb V1 + d/ed
   
   1. Verbs that end in a consonant ‘E’
   Hope        hoped
   Date        dated
   Love        loved
   
   2. Verbs that end in vowel and a consonant
   *one-syllable verb
   Stop        stopped
   Rain        rained
   Rob        robbed
   Dream        dreamed
   *two-syllable verb
   Open        opening
   Begin        beginning
   Listen        listening
   Control        controlled
   
   3. Verbs that end in two consonant
   Start        started
   Fold        folded
   Demand        demanded
   
   4. Verbs that end in ‘Y’
   Study        studied
   Enjoy        enjoyed
   Try        tried
   5. Verbs that end in ‘E’
   Die        died
   Lie        lied
   
   Irregular Verbs
   Buy            bought
   Go            went
   Drink        drank
   Etc.
2. Negative Form
   Pattern: Subject + didn’t + Verb 1st Form
   Example:
   - They didn’t study last night.
   - I didn't understand what he said.
3. Interrogative Form
   Pattern: Did + Subject + Verb 1st form
   Example:
   A:    Did they come here last week?
   B:    Yes, they did / No, they didn’t.
   A:    Did you go to school yesterday?
   B:    Yes, I did / No, I didn't.

Usually simple past tense is followed by time signal or particular time to indicate that event happen in the past, like as:

1. Yesterday
2. …..Ago
3. Last week. Last …….
4. The other day

Teaching Simple Past Tense

Teaching simple past tense for first grade of Junior high school should be given enough examples in communicative situation by asking and answering, the students will find the real description about it in deliberately. They study from their experience and teacher's explanation that support them to produce their own sentence.
Showing meaning through the situation should be better understanding of language learning that is known Eliciting. Another way of explaining the meaning is to take situation around the classroom, in which the structure could naturally be used. It can be real or imagine. The most important aspect is focus on form or pattern of simple past tense. It is recommended to demonstrate on how form or pattern is formed. It will clearly improve the students' understanding and abilities to produce their own sentences. The teacher should give explanations by the student’s native language because explaining the process using foreign language will only cause confusion (based on my own experience. It differ on each student or situation).

This is a farm around our classroom. Student learn Simple Past Tense by explaining the situation around classroom.

Various Exercises of Teaching Simple Past Tense

Exercise is a measuring instrument for knowing how far student understand the material. It is very helpful for both teacher and students. For teacher, he/she will be able to measure the students' ability. By exercise, Teacher will be able to identify the difficulty faced by students and could serve best solution to overcome it. For students, the exercise measures their ability in mastering material. If student have difficulties in understand a something, they could easily ask their teacher to explain the topic one more again. Student tend to study from their mistakes, isn’t it?. A student who masters the material will be able to overcome and finish every kind of exercise both oral and written, especially exercise of the simple past tense.
So, what kind of exercise which is suitable to be used in classroom? here they are:

1. Repetition
   Repetition is an easiest way to evaluate students. Students just repeat what the teacher says. This one may be useful as first step to make students familiar with the material.
2. Substitution
   This one makes student more active. The teacher gives prompt and gets students to give the examples and practice in forming the structure it self the prompt can be a whole sentence, a phrase or words, or pictures. This aim is to create controlled students' creativity.
3. Mechanical and Meaningful exercise.
   This exercise is useful to practice both oral and written. Students can apply pattern in a sentence directly. There are some practices which make students more active:
   - By getting the students to say the real thing about themselves.
   - By giving situation which simply the structure but It the students to decide exactly what to say.
   - By giving them freedom to add something of their own.
4. Exercise Through Dialogue
   This exercise intends to use grammar, simple past as language component, which is being taught to support language skills, especially speaking skill. So that grammar and some language skills can be taught integrated. Usually the students are given a dialogue to be read in pairs or make the dialogue in pairs then they practice in front of class without reading the book.
5. Exercise Through Writing
   This exercise emphasize in students' abilities of writing. It would be meaningful if the exercise is related with students' experience. Besides that by this exercise the students can produce some examples of simple past tense by their own words and practice the form of structure. Besides that they can develop their writing skill and have deeper understanding of structure.

This article and the others are part of my voluntary project to compare student whom take english course and who do not. I have archived the result as “Comparison in Mastery Simple Past Tense” and hope it would be useful for any teacher whom teaching Past Tense in local school. in next article I would explain the Methodology used in my research. It is already 07:28 PM when I completed writing this article. It is time for me to relax after preparing and writing for more than few hours.