Teaching and Evaluating Tense Acquisition at Lower Secondary Level

Chapter I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Old English (5th to 11th century)

Middle English (Old English mixed up with Old Norse during Viking Invasions so the English language, and more specifically, English grammar, started evolving with particular attention to syntax)

Modern English (In the 14th-15th century English became the language of power and influence once again and the end of the 16th century brought about the first complete translation of the Catholic Bible

English becomes global

A brief history of English Tenses

The English noun ‘tense’ comes from Old French tens ‘time’

The concept of Tense is explained as a grammatical category by means of which some natural languages express the temporal location of the event described by the sentence in which the grammatical tense occurs.

The traditional tenses in English:

(a) ‘Present tense’, e.g. It is sunny.

(b) ‘Past tense’ or ‘preterit’, e.g. You arrived yesterday.

(c) ‘Future tense’, e.g. I will finish it soon.

(d) ‘Present perfect’, e.g. They have been to Ireland twice.

(e) ‘Past perfect’ or ‘pluperfect’, e.g. I hadn’t made any promises to you.

(f) ‘Conditional tense’, e.g. We would be happy to meet them.

(g) ‘Conditional perfect’, e.g. He would have stayed more if he had had more time

CHAPTER II TENSES IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

II.1 Category of mood refers to the distinction between the real and unreal situations expressed by the corresponding forms of the verb

II.2 Concepts related to tenses

Time is an extra linguistic category.

Tense is a linguistic concept: it denotes the form taken by the verb to locate the situation referred to in time.

II.3 English Tenses in the 21st century

Focuses on a presentation of the English Tenses along with their specific situations and relevant examples

The category of aspect expresses how a state or action relates to time - seen as a complete event or an ongoing or repeated situation. There are two aspects in English: the progressive aspect and the perfect aspect

The term ‘Voice’ is used to describe the verb category which distinguishes an active verb phrase (E.g. found) from a passive one (E.g. were found).

Voice is a grammatical category which makes it possible to view the action of a sentence in two ways:

Example:

Mom made some cakes. [ACTIVE]

Some cakes were made by mom. [PASSIVE]