Lesson Plan Fixing: The Past Tense

A colleague of mine taught English in Spain some time ago, and pointed out to me and another colleague how strange it is that when we are starting out a language that we are only able to speak in the present tense. This came up while we were discussing how confident we felt about our abilities with Catalan, which the three of us are only beginning relatively. My thought was mainly that I would feel pretty confident, but only with talking about things that are pretty uninteresting.

The solution? Teach the past tense before you learn the present tense. Sure, maybe teach a few irregular verb fixed expressions, but the past tense is much more dynamic, and usually it's not particularly more complicated than the present tense. Impractical perhaps, but who wants to hear about what color the pen on top of the book is?

On a side note, my brother lived in Burgos for a time, and traveled to Barcelona. He wondered how well he would be able to get by, but figured that since everybody spoke Spanish also, he'd be able to do alright. To his surprise, he said, "everybody just spoke English."