The Timeline on the Board
A teacher of 26 seven-year-olds, in their second year of English, introduces the past simple. She draws a timeline on the board, writes 'regular verbs / irregular verbs' in two columns, and explains in English that 'we add -ed to the base form, but some verbs are irregular, so you have to learn them'. She uses the terms 'subject', 'base form' and 'auxiliary', and checks understanding by asking 'Is that clear?'. The children copy the timeline and ten example sentences into their notebooks. When she asks, 'What did you do yesterday?', nobody answers. Asked to write two sentences of their own, most children copy sentences from the board word for word. She has spent twenty minutes of a forty-minute lesson on this and concludes that the class is weak and needs more grammar practice.
1. Explain why these seven-year-olds could not use the past simple, referring both to their stage of cognitive development and to the way the language was presented.
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Cognitive development. Children of seven are working with concrete, here-and-now experience. A timeline is an abstraction representing an abstraction: to use it, a child must already hold a concept of past time as a linear sequence and map written symbols onto it. That is a considerable demand on top of the language itself.
Metalanguage instead of language. 'Base form', 'auxiliary', 'regular and irregular' describe the language rather than let children use it. Knowing that -ed is added to a base form does not give a seven-year-old anything to say; the rule is not usable in real time by a child whose processing is still largely whole-phrase based.
No context, no referent. The question 'What did you do yesterday?' requires the child to retrieve a memory, choose a verb, convert it to past, and produce it - four steps, cold, with the board's abstract columns as the only support. Silence is the predictable result.
Copying is not evidence of learning. The children copied because copying was the task; the words never had to mean anything. That is why they reproduce board sentences but cannot generate their own.
'Is that clear?' is not a check. Children say yes to be polite; it yielded no information, so she could not adjust.
2. Plan an alternative first presentation of past forms for this class, lasting about fifteen minutes, using concrete contexts and no grammar terminology.
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1. Anchor in a shared, concrete 'yesterday', 3 min. Use photographs of the class from the previous day (or a class puppet's day), displayed one at a time: 'Look - yesterday! Playground. We played football.' The referent is visible; nothing has to be imagined.
2. Present four or five whole phrases as chunks, not rules, 4 min, whole class with mime. 'I played football. I watched TV. I ate a sandwich. I went home.' Teacher mimes each as she says it; children copy the mime and the phrase. Irregulars are taught as chunks alongside regulars with no comment on the difference - at this stage, 'went' is simply the word for 'go' in this context.
3. Physical response, 3 min. Teacher says a phrase; children do the mime. Teacher mimes; children say the phrase. Fast, whole class, everyone producing.
4. Personal transfer with a stem, 4 min, pairs. A speaking frame with pictures: 'Yesterday I ___' plus picture cards to choose from. Children tell a partner, using the cards so nothing has to be retrieved from memory unaided.
5. Close, 1 min. Three or four children report to the class; teacher accepts the chunk as produced.
No timeline, no columns, no metalanguage - the concept of pastness is carried by the word 'yesterday' and the photographs, and the forms are learned as usable units. The explicit rule about -ed can wait until the children are older and already using the forms.
3. The teacher concludes that 'the class is weak and needs more grammar practice'. What is wrong with this conclusion, and what would better thinking look like?
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The conclusion attributes to the learners a problem that sits in the presentation. The children failed to produce the past simple after twenty minutes of teacher explanation - an activity that gave them almost no chance to use the language, no concrete referent, and no individual checking. The evidence in the case (they copy accurately) shows they can attend and reproduce; what they cannot do is generate. That is a design gap, not a deficit.
'Needs more grammar practice' would mean more of the same, which the case gives no reason to expect would work; it would also further reduce the time available for using the language.
Better thinking would be diagnostic and specific:
- What exactly could they not do? Produce a past form unsupported, in reply to an open question.
- What would make it possible? A visible referent, a model, a frame, and a partner - the conditions in any normal speaking activity.
- What will I change, and how will I know? Teach four to five phrases as chunks with mime, then re-ask the same question in pairs; if most children can now produce one phrase from the frame, the method, not the class, was the variable.
This also has a knock-on effect on time: twenty minutes of explanation in a forty-minute lesson leaves twenty for practice, and the point of the lesson is the practice.