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Topic: Expressing time

These resources look at the grammatical marking of tense and aspect in the verb phrase, and how this helps express meanings related to time. The resources show how present tense and past tense are used to locate situations in time (He speaks, He spoke), and how the tenses combine with progressive aspect (He is/was speaking) and perfect aspect (He has/had spoken) to express further distinctions of meaning.

Verb images

This lesson asks students to think about tense and aspect, what they mean, and how else we can communicate those meanings.

Goals

  • Identify verb tense and aspect. 
  • Explain the meaning of verb tense and aspect. 
  • Use multimodal literacy skills to present information from words as pictures. 

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will be describing some pictures using language, and then drawing some pictures to describe language.

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Y6 GPaS Test: Present or past tense?

In each of the following examples, indicate whether the highlighted verb is in present or past tense:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Preposition phrases, adverb phrases, and time

In each of the following examples, indicate whether time is expressed using a preposition phrase or an adverb phrase:

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Expressing time

Grammar is important for expressing information about time. It helps us to locate situations in the past, present or future, and to describe how situations unfold over time.

This is typically done by using different forms of the verb. For example:

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Aspect and tense

Look at the highlighted verb phrase in each example, then decide which combination of tense and aspect is used.

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Perfect or progressive aspect?

Decide whether the highlighted verb phrase is perfect aspect or progressive aspect?

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Tense in narrative

In this resource we will practise using tense consistently and think about the effect of using past tense versus present tense in a story.

Goals

  • Identify past tense and present tense forms.
  • Practise changing tense and using tense consistently.
  • Consider the effect of changing tense in a story.

Lesson Plan

Background

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Writing with tense and aspect

This lesson asks students to apply their understanding of tense, aspect, and time to structure passages of writing.

Goals

  • Arrange sentences in order based on tense and aspect in the sentences.
  • Practise ordering and re-ordering sentences in various ways using tense and aspect to convey the appropriate order of events.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will arrange a passage of writing and explore expressions of time in English.

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Tense and aspect in fiction

Exploring the use of tense and aspect in a range of literary texts

In this activity we will examine some short extracts from novels. The idea is to look at the tense and aspect forms used, and think about how they are used to unfold the action of the story.

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Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies