A Review of the English Tense System, Patricia Wilcox to the teacher read the selection. Then repeat as the teacher reads in phrases. Litter is garbage—like food, paper, and cans— on the ground or in the street. Where many people live together, litter is a problem. People don't always put their garbage in the garbage can. It's easier to drop a paper than to find a garbage can for it. But litter is ugly. | For more material and information please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at PATRICIA WILCOX PETERSON A REVIEW OF THE ENGLISH TENSE SYSTEM Introduction This book is a review of the relationships between times and tenses in English. It is intended for beginning and intermediate level language students in non-English speaking countries as a reinforcement and addition to their regular structure classes. The chapter dealing with each tense may be used as soon as the students have covered that tense in their formal grammar study. Alternatively the teacher may want to present certain groups of tenses together if the student seems to be having trouble with a particular concept for instance he could teach all the perfect tenses or all the continuous tenses together. The English tense system is quite complicated but the most common problem is not how to form tenses. The mechanical manipulation of verbs is easily learned through a few rules and formulas. The biggest problem is deciding which tense to use in a given situation. In order to choose correctly and easily the student must understand the meaning of the tense itself its time picture or time line. He must know what kinds of activities and states can be described by certain verbs. Certain groups of verbs are limited in their usage and this can 1 For more material and information please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at present problems too. Finally the student needs to be able to choose accurate time markers to clarify the time picture. In response to these problems this book has as its goals 1. to present clear time lines for each tense 2. to introduce categories of verbs which act in certain ways punctual verbs durative verbs and non-continuous verbs 3. to teach the proper use of time markers to show points in time frequency and duration for each tense. Because this is a supplementary text it is suggested that the teacher use it for short periods of time. Ten or fifteen minutes per day is long .
