I believe the first stage of that is either useless or impossible for students most of the time, because if they can hear the difference they can probably produce it sooner or later without the need to study it! It is therefore usually better to give them the pronunciations of some verbs with –ed endings to think about the reasons for, then they can put other verbs into the same categories by a combination of analysing the last sounds and listening to the pronunciation. Many textbooks deal with the presentation stage by asking students to listen for the pronunciations of the –ed endings in order to classify and then (often) think about why that might be. The teaching ideas further down this article can be used with whatever distinction you decide to focus on, or even all three at the same time if for some reason you decide on that. This is often worth a bit of classroom time, especially with students who add another syllable to all regular past forms. This is also fairly easy to understand or help students work out for themselves, as it is impossible to pronounce /tt/ in English without an intervening vowel sound.Īll this means a fairly large distinction between /id/ with its added syllable and /d/ and /t/ without. In contrast to those two pronunciations, after infinitives ending with /t/ (as in “pasted”) and /d/ (as in “needed”) –ed in pronounced /id/, and this does increase the number of syllables. This is because in English the number of syllables is the same as the number of vowel sounds and there is no extra vowel sound in /d/ and /t/, leading to one syllable in both “wash” and “washed” and two syllables in both “increase” and “increased”. More important than the distinction between /t/ and/d/ is the fact that neither form increases the number of syllables in the word. In addition, this distinction very rarely causes comprehension problems. For one thing, students will often reproduce this effect naturally as their fluency improves anyway, as it is easier to speak that way. Once students have understood the straightforward rule above, I generally wouldn’t spend any more time on the distinction between /d/ and /t/ pronunciations of –ed. Students can almost always work this out for themselves with some help. This means that unvoiced sounds are followed by the unvoiced /t/ sound and voiced sounds are followed by the voiced /d/ sound, obviously saving you “switching” your vocal cords on and off. This is quite easy to explain, as the difference between the final /t/ and the final /d/ sound is also that the former is unvoiced and the latter is voiced. By contrast, voiced sounds like /b/ in “robbed” and /z/ in “phased out” are followed by a /d/ sound. The general rule with regular forms is that –ed has a /t/ sound when it follows an unvoiced sound, as after /p/ in “stopped” and after /s/ in “passed”. Teaching Past Simple pronunciation and spelling rules Mixing up prepositions in Past Simple time expressions with sentences like “I did it on yesterday” and “I got up in ten o’clock” Wasting time, effort and mental capacity on things which are not important such as rarely used verbs which are irregular or differences between British and American English Not knowing the meanings of the verbs they are expected to learn the past forms of Confusion caused by irregular forms with similar spelling and different pronunciation Confusion between particular pairs of past forms, e.g. Confusing “before” with “ago” in sentences like “I came here 20 years before” (which would mean twenty years before the previous event I talked about rather than 20 years before now) Pronouncing all –ed endings as /ed/, also meaning adding syllables to many verbs that should remain the same length as the Present Simple/ infinitive Using the Present Perfect instead of the Past Simple, especially for speakers of languages such as French who have a tense with a similar structure that is used in more or less the same way as the Past Simple in English Using the Past Perfect tense instead, especially when the action happened a long time ago Student problems with the Past Simple tense tend to include: Use of the auxiliary “did” in question formation, negatives and short answers When it should be used, mainly meaning time clauses that it can be used with Pronunciation of regular and irregular forms
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