Entry 10: Present Continuous Tense

May 22^nd, 2014

This week, the students started to practise Present Continuous Tense for the first time. It is really unexpected because they have already covered Past tense. I don’t know why they follow such a sequence. I cannot think of a reason, either. As far as I observed, they frequently forget the auxiliary. Is it because they just learned the topic or is it because of “Simple Present Tense – Simple Past Tense – Present Continuous Tense” pattern? Maybe, their perception of present and past may be interfering with their learning process. All of the activities are controlled. They just need to change the form and fill in the blanks. As I mentioned earlier, students need to form full sentences, which is very dull. For example; 

A: Is Rose doing her homework now?

B: No, she isn’t doing her homework now. She is cleaning the house.

I know that they should get used to the structure but this isn’t realistic. As a part of lesson, teacher showed a PPT presentation which is about simple present vs present continuous. The PPT was about Simpsons and their life.

e.g. Bart always ________(play) football, but he ________(study) now.

One of the examples was confusing for the students. They said Homer does both of these all the time.

Homer ____________ (eat) all the time but he ____________ (sleep) right now.

Besides, they get carried away by the popularity of characters. We design our materials according to their interest and hobbies. We try to include their favourite characters, games, movies into the lesson as much as possible just to attract their attention, just to engage them in the lesson more, but sometimes they are more concerned about these things than the lesson. For example, every time teacher move to the next slide, they got surprised when they saw the different characters in Simpsons and they started to talk about them with their friends. That’s not something unpredictable but we have to set the boundaries.

Towards the end of the lesson, they wanted to play Hot Seat, which I mentioned before. Since they always play Hot Seat, their teacher made them play another game called English Wizz. (http://lingual.net/game/english-wizz/) It is like Jeopardy. They were really enthusiastic about the game.  They answered the questions in turn. Sometimes, some students got angry when their friends couldn’t answer the questions correctly, because they lose points when they give incorrect answers.