Presenting and practising

present

Sooner rather than later on your course and certainly once you start teaching seriously, i.e., as a paid-for job, you will need to present something to learners which is new to them and help them to gain a skill or learn how to express something in English.
The first thing to remember is that most people find encountering something wholly new is a difficult and intimidating event unless it can be set in the context of something they already know. In other words, we need to accommodate new information into the matrix of things we can already do or know about.

There are two ways to present:

Telling people about something
Showing people how something works

and the second of these is the one you should be doing. Here's an example:

Approach 1: telling: Last week you learned how to talk about things you do every day using the present simple. For example:
    I often watch television in the evening
    I don't work at the weekends
    I sometimes play golf on Saturdays
and so on.
Now we are going to learn how to talk about things you did last week and to do that we need to use the past tense of the verbs so, instead of:
    I work in the city centre
we say
    I worked in the city centre
and instead of
    I play golf
we say
    I played golf
Teacher writes the two model sentences on the board underlining and putting a circle around the -ed endings on the verbs.
Approach 2: showing: Last week you learned how to talk about things you do every day using the present simple. For example:
    I often watch television in the evening
    I don't work at the weekends
    I sometimes play golf on Saturdays
and so on.
Now we are going to learn how to talk about things you did last week and to do that we need to change the verbs.
You are going to hear a short conversation between two friends talking in a café about last week and see if you can hear what verbs they use.
Teacher plays the short tape / DVD sequence two or three times.
The students listen and try to write the verbs they hear before comparing their answers with a partner.
OK? Here's the script with the words the people used in red. Look at the verbs and talk to your partner about what you notice.

The argument here is that approach 2 is more effective because the learners are doing four things:

Associating new forms with forms they already know (both approaches focus on this).
Noticing how the language works.
Hearing and/or seeing the language being used for a communicative purpose in a real context that they understand.
Learning about the language by discovering patterns, not being told about them.

You can see, too, that in the second approach, the teacher talks a lot less and the students talk a lot more. That's a bonus. The aim is to get students to:

extend their knowledge, notice language in context and discover how it works

and it's a basic teaching skill.

	A little scenario
They must have fallen in love

Try it for yourself.
Make some notes about how you would plan to teach the language using the ideas 2a to 2e below.

Here's the scenario:

You are going to present the meaning of the verb must in the sense of saying what you believe to be true about the past or present. For example:
John must have arrived by now. He left an hour ago.
I must have left my keys on the kitchen table. I'll go back and get them.
Your task is to:
1. Think about what the learners already need to know about the verb must and the form of what follows (have plus the past participle).
2. Think about contexts to use to explain the concepts.
3. Think about how you will draw your learners' attention to the verb forms.
4. Devise a task in which the learners can discover the rules of grammar and meaning.
5. Think of a reasonable context in which the language can be used and practised.

Click when you have made your notes.

What the learners already know
1. Most learners encounter the verb must in the sense of obligation but that is not at all how it is used here. Here, the verb is used to express the fact that the speaker believes that there is a strong likelihood of a situation or event being true.
  When it means obligation, the verb has no past form so we cannot say:
  *I musted go
  and we use the verb have to as in:
  I had to go.
2. In this sense of the verb, however, we can form a past tense to speculate about what has happened and this is the second thing learners should already know.
  We do that by using the base form of the verb plus have plus the past participle.
  This is parallel to how we form the present perfect to talk about the present in the light of past events, as in:
  They have arrived (so now we can start)
  etc.
  The important difference is that because have follows must, it does not change so we cannot have:
  *John must has arrived
  At the level where this form is taught, most learners know that must is always followed by the simple base form of the main verb.
3. The third and most important thing that the learners probably already know (or have seen) is how the verb is used in the present tense to speak about a current situation, so we get, e.g.:
  He said his car was a black Ford. That must be it!
  It's 7:42 so this must be our train.
  and so on.
  This is the sense of the verb that we need here so it is this knowledge that we need to build on to help the learners speculate about the past as well as the present.
Context
1. First, we have to remind the learners about the present tense forms of this use of the verb must. You may have some good ideas but one way is to use a set of pictures and a short dialogue such as:
  
  There's someone at the door!
  
  It must be the postman.
  
  Make sure the learners recognise the connection between the pictures before you focus on the dialogue.
2. Now you need to elicit the meaning and make sure the concept is clear. Remember, this is not to do with obligation, it expresses that the second speaker is sure that the person ringing the bell is the postman.
3. The next step is to place a similar scene in the past. You could use another picture for this:
  
  Ah, the papers are here.
  Yes, the boy must have come early today.
4. Now, you need to establish the meaning of this structure through some careful concept checking questions:
      Is the paper boy here now?
      When did the paper boy come?
      Was he early?
      Is the speaker sure about that?
5. Now we have the context clear, you can focus the learners on the form (the bits in red) and elicit from them (do not be tempted to tell them) how we make a speculation about the past: must + have + past participle.
  On the board, you can write up a couple of sentences to serve as models, eliciting the form from the class as you go along:
  The train must have left
  Someone must have sent her some flowers
  etc.
  Highlight the forms.
  You can use more pictures for this such as:
Now you need to make sure that the learners can pronounce the language satisfactorily because they will need to later in the lesson. Use one or two of your model sentences and make sure they can pronounce especially the contracted form must've.
That's pronounced something like mastav and is transcribed as /ˈmə.stəv/. In some cases the final /v/ sound is omitted.

Now, you need a context in which to set the practice. One slightly ghoulish but attention-grabbing situation is:

You have just moved into an apartment. The last tenant has suddenly died but left some things in the apartment. Think about what he or she *must have done* or *must have been*. The first one is an example.
a souvenir from Italy	She must have been on holiday in Italy
lots of beautiful cookery books
twelve ashtrays
lots of metro tickets
etc.

Learners do this individually (while you monitor) and then they compare their speculations.

Ooops

That's all there is to it! What can possibly go wrong?

Well, what could go wrong? Think for a minute and then click here

The first thing that can go wrong is that you have set tasks which require the learners to guess rather than be sure so they end up trying to say things like:
He might have been to Italy
She could have been a smoker
and that is not the focus of your lesson.
In the examples we have used here, we have been careful to make the situation very clear and encourage a natural use of must've not might've or could've.
If you haven't analysed the language properly, you may have missed the fact that the negative of this form is not what the learners might expect. The negative of:
    The paper boy must have come early
is NOT
    *The paper boy mustn't have come early
but either
    The paper boy can't have come early
or
    The paper boy couldn't have come early.
If you aren't alert to this problem, learners may try to use negative expressions and get it wrong and that will bog you down in all sorts of irrelevant explanation.
If you don't continually stress that we are talking about the past, learners may fall back on what they know and produce:
She must be a smoker
She must have Italian friends
etc.
That's why we made sure the previous occupant of the apartment was dead!

When you plan, always try to imagine what could go wrong. Then you are properly prepared.

Troublesome words and structures

One of the areas which cause a certain amount of angst on CELTA and other initial training courses are words which are conceptually troublesome and for which translation rarely works well. There are a number of these and it will pay some dividends if you take the time to check them out.
Here's a linked list to guides which will explain them:

Most of the guides to these words are in the in-service section of the site but don't let that put you off.

	There's someone at the door!
	It must be* the postman.*

Presenting and practising

A little scenario

Here's the scenario:

Click when you have made your notes.

Ooops

Troublesome words and structures