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Past Perfect Simple - discovery without freer practice

The main goal of today's lesson was the discovery of the Past Perfect Tense and the controlled and freer practice with it.
I started with the pronunciation exercise on p. 71, which was a spontaneous follow-up on an exercise that was set for homework.
I decided to board and elicit the differences in pronunciation when "the" comes before a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a consonant.
I boarded, elicited pronunciation and wrote phonetic transcription for the following words appearing in the exercise:

the Pacific /ðə 'pəsifik/
the Amazon /ði: 'æməzon/
the Andes /ði: 'ændi:z/

I successfully elicited the rules for using /ðə '/ before consonants and /ði: '/ before vowels.
Next we moved on to the text that served as the starting point for the grammar discovery.
I pre-taught vocabulary by writing a few words, expressions on the board and eliciting the meaning (set off, second-hand, run out of luck, steam).

Then there was reading for gist followed by reading for details.

We moved on to the vocabulary task, followed by a similar task in the workbook. The students practiced using phrases like "sooner or later", "give or take", "all or nothing" in two gap fill exercises. After that they had to tick the sentences that were true for them and compare them and discuss with their partners. This always works well, they were discussing for at least ten minutes and I had to stop them and ask for feedback.

Next was the discovery of past perfect based on the timeline on p. 73, which turned out to be a little complicated.
I boarded two sentences from ex. 2 on p. 141. and drew two timelines. The students had to complete the timelines with initials representing actions from the sentences.



This wasn't very easy to grasp for the students especially because some were convinced that "when" always means that two actions are simultaneous. That's why the timeline representing first sentences has the two demarcations drawn closer to each other than in the second timeline. I had to do a few more similar sentences with the timelines for students to understand this. Then I drew the first timeline on the board alongside the example sentence representing it. I erased the two demarcations in the past and drew them even closer to each other, erased "when" and elicited "as soon as" in its place. When they get the concept of these timelines it's very easy to play with them further and elicit other adverbs such as "before","after".
Controlled practise was done with exercises on p. 141 of the student's book. ( ex. 1, 2).

Controlled speaking practise was done with pairwork exercise on p. 118 and 123. This wasn't very successful because for some reason the creators of the exercise decided to throw in Past Continuous alongside Past Simple and Past Perfect in a jigsaw gap-fill. I overlooked this in my planning and unfortunately this was overwhelming for the students. I wouldn't recommend using this exercise for freer practice.
I am still looking for a good freer speaking exercise for Past Perfect and Past Simple. I also sometimes find it necessary to reduce the importance of the Past Perfect Tense based on it's low representation in the spoken language. I find it a bit disheartening when after introducing Past Perfect at intermediate level students become somewhat obsessed with this tense and start using it over-abundantly even when it's not necessary. That's why I like to preface or conclude these lessons by saying that it isn't a tense that is used very often. But I am curious to hear other teacher's thoughts on this so please share your experiences.
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