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This unit was about past tenses: usage, grammatical structure, common errors/mistakes made by students and activities to teach these tenses.
There are 4 past tenses in English:
Past Simple: to talk about finished actions in the past e.g I was born in 1991. There are regular (walk - walked) and irregular verbs (go - went) that the students need to learn by heart. To help with this, the teacher can make memory games with cards. Usually the mistakes/errors of the students are that they don't use did - didn't to make questions/negatives or that they don't use the correct form of the verbs in past.
Past continuous: it's usually used to to talk about actions that were happening in the past e.g I was spleeping at 8 am. Also, you can use it to give descriptions, to talk about gradual development or to indicate that an action interrupted another one in the past (While I was having a bath, someone knocked on the door). The mistakes/error students make are related to grammar (they forget to put am, is are in the sentence or the -ing) and usage (confusion between past simple/past continuous). Activities to teach this tense include the detective game and to tell stories combining past simple/past continuous.
Past perfect: used to indicate that an action finished after another action happened in the past, e.g.: When mom arrived home, I had already finished my homework. For the students it's a little bit confusing to differentiate past simple/past perfect. You can help them with these activities: give results and ask them what produced them, tell a story and then retell it backwards, etc.
Past perfect continuous: used to talk about longer actions that were happening in the past up to the moment we're thinking about, e.g.: I had been watching horror movies for hours when Julian came to visit me. You can teach this tense by writing lenghts of time in slips of paper (one hour, two moths, one year, etc.) and making the students select one. Then, they can tell you what they did for that lenght of time before any other events: one year -> I had been studying English for a year before traveling to Scotland.
