Dialogue Practice with the Continuous Tenses

Objectives:

• The learner will team with another learner to create dialogues in the present continuous, past continuous, future continuous and present perfect continuous tenses that reflect authentic situations.

• The learner will perform authentic dialogues in front of their peers. 

Duration:

    2-3 hours

Materials:

• Dialogue Practice with the Continuous Tenses sheet

• More Dialogue Practice with the Continuous Tenses worksheet

• Verb Tense Tutorial

• White board and markers

Activities:       

1. Teacher tells learners that they will practice writing and saying dialogues using the continuous tenses studied during the last several lessons. Learners will participate in two dialogue activities. The first will ask them to read a dialogue that has already been started for them; learner pairs will add 2-4 more lines of dialogue depending upon the directions. The second assignment will ask that learners create two of their own dialogues in two different tenses using the prompts given. Learner pairs will choose one of the tenses while the teacher chooses the other.

2. Teacher conducts review of the present continuous, past continuous, future continuous and present perfect continuous tenses by writing four sentence prompts on the board: 1) I/go/to the movies after dinner. 2) We/drive/from Roanoke to Richmond every day. 3) I/take/two classes every semester. In substitution drill format, teacher underlines one of the prompts, points to a learner and says "present continuous," "future continuous," etc. until all four tenses have been expressed. Teacher does the same with the remaining two sentence prompts until learners have verbalized 12 sentences. Note: Teacher should assign questions to learners based upon previous observations and evaluations so that the questions are appropriately challenging to each learner.

3. Teacher forms learner pairs based upon abilities and assigns one of the four dialogues from the Dialogue Practice with the Continuous Tenses sheet to each pair. Dialogue assignments are as follows: high ability pair: present perfect continuous; average ability pair: future continuous or past continuous; low ability pair: present continuous. Learner pairs complete dialogues with minimal assistance from teacher. Learner pairs perform dialogue in front of the class.

4. Working in same pairs, learners choose a dialogue from the More Dialogue Practice with the Continuous Tenses worksheet; teacher assigns an additional dialogue depending upon the ability of each pair; lower ability pairs do only the present perfect continuous dialogue. Learner pairs complete dialogues with minimal assistance from teacher. Learner pairs perform dialogue in front of the class.

Assessment:

Teacher monitors written work evaluates oral presentations