Delta Module 2

Lesson Plan

LSA: Pronunciation of Regular Past Tense Verbs

Title of the BE: Past Simple (Skill: Grammar)

Name: Joel Swagman

Candidate number: 1217

Centre name: IH Chiang Mai

Centre number: OO002

Date: November 8, 2018

Contents:                                                        Page Number

Group profile

        This is a group of eight students studying on a general English training course.  All of them are monolingual Thai speakers.  It is considered an adult course, although the youngest student is 17.  The students range in age from 17 years old to 57 years old.  However most of the students (6 out of 8) are in their 20s and 30s.  The group is composed of 6 females and 2 males.  Attendance on the course is voluntary, but 7 out of the 8 students attend regularly.  One student is habitually late do to his work schedule.

        All of the students cited utilitarian reasons for studying English—either to help them advance in their job, for travelling, for communication with foreign partners, to help them with their school studies, or for immigration reasons.

        The students range in ability, but they are all capable of understanding simple directions.  They can produce short sentences and take part in simple conversations, although not always with grammatical accuracy.  They have studied the English verb tense systems, and are familiar with the rules of verb structures like the past simple.  However, they do not use the past simple in free production.  They also have problems pronouncing consonant clusters, which affects their ability to pronounce many regular past tense verbs.

The class is upper-elementary.  It was recently split off from a larger group of students who were considered general elementary.  The general elementary class had run for 2 weeks before being split, and the current upper-elementary course will run for 4 weeks.  The total study time is 6 weeks.  This is the third week of total study, and the first week of the new upper-elementary course division.  

The course meets for roughly 2 hours a day, 5 days a week (Monday through Friday).  During the first 2 weeks, it was taught by 6 teachers.  It is currently being taught by 6 different teachers, making for a combined total of 12 teachers during the length of the course.  However at present, only 6 teachers are responsible for the class.  The typical format is for two 50 minute lessons to be taught over the course of a 2-hour session.  Each lesson is taught by a different teacher, so the students usually are taught by 2 teachers each day.

Individual profiles

Aims & Learning outcomes

Aim:

* By the end of the lesson, learners will have been made aware of, and be better able to produce, past tense regular verb endings.

Outcome:

* By the end of the lesson, learners will be more aware of the sounds of regular past tense verbs, and be better able to produce these sounds themselves.

Language analysis

Meaning

        Although the past simple can be used to express hypotheticals and social distance (and for this reason is sometimes called the “remote” form), it is most commonly presented to as referring to events in the past.  This is especially true for elementary learners.  Today’s lesson will focus on this past meaning.

Form

Regular past tense verbs are usually formed in writing by adding the “-ed” suffix to the infinitive form.  

In addition to this general rule, in writing there are a number of additional spelling variations.
* For verbs ending in “e”, only “d” is added to the infinitive
* For many verbs ending in “y”, “y” is replaced by “i” and then “ed” is added.
* The final consonant is doubled in cases where the infinitive is one syllable and ends with a single vowel plus consonant combination, when the final syllable of the infinitive is stressed and ends with a single vowel plus consonant, and (in British English) in cases where the infinitive ends in “l”
* For verbs ending in “ic”, “k” plus “ed” is added to the infinitive.

        Of the regular past tense verbs pre-selected for presentation in today’s lesson, all of them are formed by the general rule of adding “-ed” to the infinitive, with the exception of “like” (which only adds “d”).

Pronunciation

        The “-ed” suffix has three possible pronunciations: /t/, /d/ or /ɪd/.  It is pronounced as /t/ following unvoiced consonants: /p,ʧ,k,f,θ,s,ʃ/.  It is pronounced as /d/ following voiced consonants: /b,d,ʤ,g,v,ð,z,ʒ,m,n,ŋ,l,r,w,j/, and vowels.  It is pronounced as /ɪd/ following /t/ or /d/.

Timetable fit

        This class has already had several lessons on the past simple.  Two weeks ago (on October 25) they studied the past simple in the context of what they did last weekend.  They studied regular and irregular verbs, including past simple transformation) on October 26.  They studied the past simple and past continuous twice last week on October 29 and November 1.  
        None of the previous lessons on the past simple focused on pronunciation of regular past tense verbs, and were mostly meaning focused.
        In addition, the students had a lesson last week (October 31) on writing short stories.  The natural tense for this should have been the past simple, because the past simple is the tense most often used for narratives.  But the teacher reports that she did not emphasize the past simple in the lesson, and that, left to their own grammatical devices, most of the students did not use the past simple in their free writing.
        This week, the students have had 5 lesson so far: the phonemic chart and needs analysis, adverbs of frequency, participle adjectives, connected speech, and turn taking.  This will be the 5th lesson of the week, and they will have one more lesson the following day focusing on more practice with participle adjectives.

Assumed knowledge

* Based on the fact that the students are upper-elementary, I am assuming that they will have studied the past simple before.  (This is further confirmed by their study history from the past 2 weeks.)  

* I am assuming that the students will have declarative knowledge of the past tense even if they do not use it in free production.

* I am assuming that the students will already be familiar with the basic meaning of the past simple—to talk about a finished event in the past time.

* I am assuming that students will already know how to form regular past tense verbs—at least in the written form.

* I am assuming that students will have enough vocabulary to already know most of the verbs I will be presenting to them.  I am assuming that the vocabulary presentation at the beginning will be mostly review, with a few new words introduced.

* I am assuming that the students will have sufficient listening comprehension to be able to follow the general gist of the story I present to them.

* I am assuming that the students will have sufficient knowledge of simple sentence structure to be able to comprehend the sentences in my story.  (All of the sentences are either simple sentences or compound sentences, but no complex sentences).

Anticipated problems and solutions

Commentary

Choice of Topic

I have spent a lot of time in Vietnam working with students on pronunciation of regular past tense verbs.  When I noticed it was a problem here in Thailand as well, I wanted to do a lesson on it.

        According to David Smyth, Thai learners have many of the same issues with the past tense that Vietnamese learners do--they are not used to inflecting verbs in their own language (and so consequently often do not do so in English), and they have a problem with the consonant clusters on regular past tense verbs (Smyth, 2001, p.350).

        I noticed in my work with the upper-intermediate group that they had trouble with the consonant clusters on regular past tense verbs.  With the elementary group, I have noticed that they have trouble with both consonant clusters, and also trouble remembering to use the regular past tense verbs in free production.

        On their syllabus, it appears that the elementary learners have already had several lessons on past forms and on the past simple specifically.  However I checked with all the teachers who have taught those lessons, and no work on pronunciation of regular past tense consonant clusters was done.

Voiced/ Unvoiced Sounds

        I personally have always been skeptical of techniques that try to train learners to consciously voice or unvoiced consonants.  This is mostly based on my personal feeling that I do not consciously control my own vocal cords when I am focused on conversation.  But of course first language acquisition is different than second language acquisition, so it is good to keep an open mind about these things.

        The literature appears to be split on whether or not explaining the rules on voiced and unvoiced consonants help.  Underhill believes that students being consciously aware of voicing is the first step towards control of it (2005, p.126-127).  Several other ESL websites and online sources advocate similar techniques of raising awareness of voicing.

On the other hand, Krashen and Terrell cite research that classroom pronunciation course did not improve the pronunciation of the learners, and conclude that consciously learned rules concerning pronunciation are not available for free production (1983, p.89-90).  Toth talks about the voicing of regular past tense endings specifically, and argues teaching the rule is of little use to the learner because of the limited attentional resources, and because the rules are actually much more complicated in connected speech (2005, p.123-131).  
        I am choosing to teach the voicing rule for two reasons: One is that I believe if the matter is in debate, it is better to err on the side of teaching than not teaching.  (I do not believe the learner will be harmed by knowing the rule, even if they cannot yet use it.)  Secondly, some learners are curious about why the same morpheme is pronounced in different ways.  For these learners, it is helpful to have the rule if only just to satisfy their own curiosity.

I will also be supplementing the conscious rules with drilling to help habit formation.

Task Repetition

        The idea of task repetition comes from Uncovering Grammar by Scott Thornbury.  Thornbury argues that repeating the task leads to more grammar accuracy.  The reason is because learners’ attention is focused on the message the first time, but as they repeat the task, the message becomes more automatic, and they have more attention to focus on grammatical accuracy.

        This is referred to as the 4-3-2 technique by Thornbury and others, because in the first repetition the each learner takes 4 minutes to tell their story, then 3 minutes, then 2 minutes (2001, p.25-26).  However, in my experience, even advanced learners have trouble maintaining speech for 4 minutes.  Often even 2 minutes of monologue is difficult.  So I will not be using the 4-3-2 time frames, but will still be incorporating the idea of task repetition.

Word Count: 641

Bibliography

Krashen, Stephen, & Tracy Terrell. (1983). The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom. Hayward, Calif: Alemany Press.

Smyth, David. (2001). Thai English. p.343-356. In Learner English edited by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith. Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, Scott. (2001). Uncovering Grammar. Macmillan Publishers.

Toth, Andrea. (2005). When not to Teach Pronunciation. The CATESOL Journal 17.1 2005. p.123-131. Retrieved from:http://www.catesoljournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CJ17_toth.pdf

Underhill, Adrian. (2005). Sound Foundations. Macmillian Education

Materials

1. PowerPoint.  Self created. All images on the PowerPoint are taken from Bing Image Search (conducted through Microsoft Word) and licensed under creative commons
2. Picture cards (Handout cut up into pictures).  Self created. All the pictures are the same as those on the PowerPoint (mentioned above), and licensed under creative commons.  Included below for reference.
3. Verb Sorting Worksheet.  (Includes component cut-up into cards). Self created.  Included below for reference.

Cut up and scramble:

Answers:

I wanted to make my wife happy, so I decided to make her dinner.  I asked her what she wanted to eat. She answered spaghetti.  I hated spaghetti, but I wanted to make her happy.

So I cooked the spaghetti.  I planned everything.  I started cooking at 4pm.  I needed a pot of water. I waited for the water to get hot, and then I added the spaghetti.  I hoped she would like it.

She tasted it, and it she liked it.  She was so happy that she kissed me.  We enjoyed the dinner together.  She talked about her day, and I listened.  We finished dinner at 6pm.

Afterwards, I washed the dishes.  My wife helped.  Then we walked in the park together.  We looked at the trees.  I climbed up one of the trees

Then we returned home.  We opened the door and entered the house, and then relaxed on the sofa.  We watched a movie on TV.  The movie ended at 10, but we were tired, so we stopped watching at 9.