ESL Narrative Tenses Lesson Plan

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Description

Learning how to use narrative tense is important skill for story telling. It invloves using different past tenses to describe when events happened. The complexties and intricacies of these tenses is what can make it somewhat confusing for students.

This lesson plan focuses on past perfect, past continuous and past perfect continuous. It is a fun way of teaching the grammar point while keeping the students constantly involved in the class. It uses a story about being burgled to demonstrate the narrative tenses.

Instructions

Warmer

The first slide is a selection of past tense questions. Begin the class with a mingle discussion activity. Show the page on the board. Ask the students to talk to each other about a question for 30 seconds then move to another student.

Pay attention to any errors that you overhear and put them on the board. A feedback session can be done based on those errors. 

Introduction to the grammar

1. Ask one or two students what they did last night. Then tell them something terrible happened to you last night.
2. Show the second slide which is a timeline of last night’s events. Explain that you arrived home and the police were waiting for you. This will pique your students’ interest. Show this on the timeline.
3. Ask them what grammar is written in the blue. Hopefully they’ll be able to tell you that it is the past continuous. The third slide gives an explanation of the grammar. Use concept questions to make sure they understand its function.
4. The following slide explains that you’d been burgled. This will definitely get their interest!
5. After going through the events that happened, ask what grammar it is. Maybe they’ll know that is it is the past perfect. They’ll be able to see this on the timeline.The following slide explains the grammar. Again concept questions are really important at this stage.
6. The next slide has sentences in the past perfect continuous adding more narrative detail to the story.
7. The following slide has the grammar rules of the past perfect continuous. Similar to previous slides, use concept question to check understanding.

The Day the Towers came down

If your students are adults, ask them they remember where they were and what they were doing when 9/11 happened.

If they are younger, explain to them what happened and where you were when it took place.

Show the next slide, in pairs ask students to use the correct grammatical form in each space.

Go through the answers.

Make a story

Split the class into groups of 4. Each group will have to make a story based on cues.

You can also get the groups to act them out if you have time to make it more fun.