Having written about teaching the perfect tense, questions, negatives, adjectives and the near future, I'm turning my attention to the imperfect tense. I'm going to suggest some guidelines for teaching the imperfect to classes of varying aptitude and prior skill. As usual, this is just my take based on experience, but including a smattering of research to support my choices.
Guideline 1
Adapt what you do the aptitude and prior attainment of the class. With a small minority of high-achieving classes, sometimes in selective and private schools, you could go all old-school: lay out some rules for usage and formation, then do practice activities before moving to some freer production. That's the PPP (Presentation - Practice - Production approach). I would not have done that myself, even with my smartest classes. It's a bit dull and uncommunicative, but it might work as long as there were lots of practice before freer production. A tiny minority of motivated students may already have looked up the tense in advance and know what they are doing immediately.
With a mixed-aptitude class or lower-attaining group, I would pay scant attention to the tense. For many classes, with the limited time available, I would keep the focus on the present and perfect tenses. After all, it's completely possible to communicate with reasonable clarity while avoiding the imperfect tense. For example, imagine hearing this:
Quand j'ai été plus jeune j'ai mangé beaucoup plus de bonbons.
Grammatically incorrect, but quite understandable.
Or how about this?
J'ai regardé la télé quand maman est entrée.
A bit more ambiguous, but still understandable. A sympathetic native speaker (to use that old phrase) would get the message.
So, even though the imperfect is much simpler to form than the perfect tense (in cogntive load theory terms it has fewer interacting elements), to add this to the burden of struggling students seems unnecessary. I might make sure they can understand and use j'étais and j'avais, but that's about all.
If you're a purist, you might accuse me of 'dumbing down' the syllabus, but my experience tells me that you have to prioritise, and with many classes, even getting students to use some basic chunks in present and perfect tense is an achievement. You'll know what I mean.
In general, prioritising what to spend time on is a big issue in language teaching. In my post on adjectives, I suggested not spending much time on agreements for the same reason that, with some classes, I would dwell little on the imperfect. Focus on what is learnable and gives most communicative power. Think of surrender value.
Guideline 2
Introduce the tense with a focus on meaning, but get students to quickly notice form. There is an ongoing debate in language teaching research concerning the extent to which you forefront meaning or form. There is honestly no right answer here, with so many variables involved. My own preference when introducing tenses was to choose activities with a focus on meaning, but getting students to notice form very quickly. Students are more interested in meanings in forms, so a danger is that students don't bother to pay attention to the form of the language unless you explicitly point it out - make it 'salient'.
Bearing that in mind, my go-to way of introducing the imperfect tense was to display two columns pictures. The images represented someone's life — where they live(d), the job they do/did, what they eat/ate, their current and past hobbies and so on. Ten images would be enough and the verbs would be regular where it would be possible to clearly hear the final phoneme of the imperfect tense examples. Good examples are regardait, mangeait (notwithstanding the minor spelling issue), habitait, travaillait, and jouait. With my high-performers I would have included était and avait. The key point is that students must clearly hear that final phoneme.
The left hand-column was labelled TODAY and the right-hand column IN 1995 (or any other suitable year in the distant past). There would be no text, just images. I would then read aloud the left-hand column and just let students listen. I'd then read aloud the right hand column, exaggerating slightly the endings of the verbs. Most students would realise there was something going on and the smartest ones would quickly work out that the /e/ sound (as in Il mangeAIT) indicated a change in meaning. I might ask about this straight away, or leave it until later. "What can you hear?" "What's going on?" "What does that sound mean?" This is a sort of guided discovery, inductive approach. It's about getting students to notice. (Many researchers say that you have to notice a form for it to be acquired.) Have a look at Schmidt's Noticing Hypothesis.
I would do choral repetition of both columns so students would make the phonological distinction out loud. Still no visible text. Then I would display the images with the text and do more choral repetition.
What followed varied, no doubt, but I may have then said aloud sentence abd the class would identify left or right (weaker classes). Or I would do question-answer, such as:
Aujourd'hui, il mange du caviar ou du jambon? (Student: Il mange...)
Qu'est-ce qu'il mange aujourd'hui? (Student: Il mange..)
En 1995, il mangeait di caviar? (Student: Non, il mangeait des sandwichs au fromage.)
Il mangeait du poulet, non? (Student: Non, il mangeait des sandwichs au fromage.)
And so on. I would interveave single answers with choral repetition so that everyone got to hear, see and use multiple examples of the verb forms, while making them more awre of th meaning contrasts.
This is traditional display questioning. (A display question is where everyone already knows the answer, but here the aim is to practise lanuage. It's sometimes known as circling.)
Guideline 3
Don't dwell on descriptions of usage. Forming the imperfect is straightforward — simple rules, not many exceptions and no auxiliaries to worry about. Describing when it is used is another matter. As a smart student at school I found such explanations confusing. This sort of thing:
"An incomplete action in the past"
"A repeated, habitual action in the distant past"
"To describe situation or states, such as time, weather and state of mind"
I could go on.
BBC Bitesize has a little video along these lines. It's a good example of simplifying a grammar description to make it accessible.
While I might have briefly described how the tense it used, my rule of thumb for students was this:
"Use the imperfect if you want to say I was doing or I used to do. If it was happening or used to happen, use the imperfect."
It's more complex than this, of course, but those complications could be left for more advanced level work. Again, it's about priorities. Funnily enough, trained to avoid L1, I was uncomfortable resorting to English, but I knew it was the sensible thing to do and that it had worked for me.
Guideline 4
Recyle the verbs in future lessons. This is about spaced learning of course. If you just leave the tense behind and fail to reuse it, it will likely be forgotten. Remember the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. (If you don't know it, here is an explanation.) Interleave the imperfect with other tenses.
Wyas to recycle the imperfect could be through aural and written texts, including narrow listening and reading, written composition or doing the "Interview a grandparent" homework.
So that's my best advice on teaching the imperfect tense. You'll have your own preferences, but I hope this post has got you thinking a bit. Thanks for reading.
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