The others take place during a visit to the zoo, and during a bank robbery, respectively. One is set in the Old West and is called, “The Sheriff of Calico County”. I attempted to create short paragraph stories that would be of some interest as well. As an added feature, I boldface the verbs in the paragraphs. The stories could be cut into strips and re-ordered, acted out as a “skit”, pantomimed, or a variety of written exercises and comprehension activities could be added. For example, Play becomes played, and stay becomes stayed, but try and cry become tried or cried. Also they’ll practice with when to change “y” to an “i” before adding –ed. They can fill-in the blanked out endings in the paragraph to practice adding –ed or just –d as required. TEFL Learners can read the story paragraphs aloud, focusing on the correct pronunciation of the verb ending forms. Students in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Panama and Ecuador have all benefited from these simple “stories” I hope that perhaps your EFL / ESL students will too. I’d noticed the same propensity towards pronunciation problems with –ed regular verb endings in other Spanish-speaking areas, so I prepared exercises to help with this early on. Since my learners are all from a Spanish-speaking country in South America, Colombia, they typically exhibit a problem in pronouncing the –ed verb ending in its various forms. So, I continue to use them even though I know this speech pattern is not going to occur in natural English speech. They’re harder to read and pronounce than “normal”, but the intensive practice seems to be quite helpful. But, to give my EFL English students some practice in writing the forms of regular verbs in past and especially in pronouncing them, I came up with a couple of shorts using only this form. Native speakers simply don’t talk that way. Writing them was a lot more difficult than I’d originally imagined since use of only regular verbs in a narrative is not really authentic language. Whenever I have to teach the Simple Past tense in English, one activity I always use is speaking and writing practice using some short “stories” that I made up.
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