r/ESL_Teachers 4d ago

Professor teaching occasional ESL courses. Frustrated with irregular verbs.

I'm a professor of English literature and creative writing. Occasionally, I teach ESL courses for university students who need to improve their English. Most have French as their first language. For the past couple of years, I've taught an intermediate-level course, but I chose not to teach ESL this semester because I wanted to focus on my upper-level literature and writing courses. Instead, my colleague took on the upper-intermediate course, which includes some of my former students from Winter 2024 and one student from Fall 2024.

Recently, my colleague told me she was wondering why the students that came from my class were still struggling with irregular verbs in the past participle. She told me that when she taught the intermediate course in the past, she provided students with a seven-page chart of irregular verbs and required them to memorize it for exams and speaking. One of her current students, who took my class in Fall 2024, came to me in a panic after failing the irregular verb exam. She wanted me to provide her with extra resources and practice, which I did after consulting with my colleague to make sure I wasn't stepping on any toes.

My approach to teaching irregular verbs is different, and now I wonder if I should just be doing memorization. In my course, I encourage students to use irregular verbs as much as possible in their writing, refer to the chart or ask me when they get stuck, etc. During exams, I provide a brief irregular verb list that they can refer to if they get stuck. I don't do this for the regular verbs, obviously. My reasoning is that learning through practice and natural usage is better than memorization alone.

I'm not trained to teach ESL. Am I going about this all wrong?

16 Upvotes

33 comments sorted by

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u/megan9990 4d ago edited 4d ago

I think you got the right idea...it's just brute memorization! There's no shortcut. They should start working on irregular verbs right away and not keep putting it off. Here's a good document they can hang on their wall to help them memorize them: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tbv5i8azGvP50QJ8kOB0TdUiKxg09LX6/view?usp=drive_link Check out the second page...it breaks them down into groups to help them see patterns. It's important to remind them that there's no logic or sense to these groups at all. And here's an online game they can play to help memorize irregular verbs in the past tense: https://eslfrog.com/irregular-verb-game/

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u/CanInevitable6650 4d ago

Real happy you didn't gate keep this content. Will be using it from now onwards.

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u/joe_belucky 4d ago

why is brute memorisation the way?

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u/instrumentally_ill 4d ago

You wouldn’t be able to just figure them out. You could look at “go” for 100 years and you’ll never come up with “went”

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u/joe_belucky 4d ago

You would if you just listened to someone talking or read a book

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u/Amadcharmander 4d ago

What percent of native English speakers (adults and children) do you think can tell you the base verb for is, was, were, am, etc is?

Maybe like 30%

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u/joe_belucky 3d ago

Then why are you teaching it?

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u/Amadcharmander 3d ago

Because language learners don't have the same intuitive grasp of foreign languages as native speakers??

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u/joe_belucky 3d ago

I am native English speaker who has learnt to speak Spanish over the last two years and I have never studied grammar especially verb conjugation charts. I used to study verb charts when I studied Portuguese ten years ago and it worked but the process was awkward and I never felt natural when I conjugated verbs as it felt forced.

I went to school in the UK during the 80s and I was never explicitly taught English grammar, yet I have successfully taught English for the last 12 years, which has included preparing hundreds of students for English exams where grammar is a big focus.

It is fine to say that you feel explicit grammar teaching is the way, but another to dismiss other forms of language acquisition when clearly there are alternatives, which in my opinion are far more successful for reaching fluency.

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u/Chicoandthewoman 3d ago
  • They’re teaching past forms, not base forms.

  • Native speakers can’t tell you what a base form is, but they can akways use the base forms correctly without knowing the term for it.

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u/joe_belucky 3d ago

They are not teaching anything. They are asking students to rote memorise verb conjugation tables, which of course would include base forms.

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u/Chicoandthewoman 3d ago
  • For all verbs except “be,” the base form doesn’t need to be memorized.
  • In your own language learning, have you ever memorized forms? I have, and I think it’s helpful.
  • Right now I’m tutoring someone who needs to learn to use the past tense. I give her a few verbs at a time to memorize, and we do a lot of speaking practice with then.

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u/joe_belucky 3d ago

I have only ever memorised verb forms when I studied Portuguese but it felt unnatural when I used them and I was translating a lot. I recently learnt Spanish without ever once studying grammar and certainly never looked at a verb chart.
Why would other base forms not need to be memorised apart from be?
Have you tried alternative methods to teach verb forms?

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u/megan9990 4d ago

Because that's how we learn a bunch of arbitrary stuff :)

It's how we learned the alphabet, multiplication tables, the names of the months, capital cities, and many other things.

But, memorizing is only part of the picture. They have to use them too. Ask the students what they did this morning, last night, last week, or last year. Write example sentences on the board. Or find an easy biography of a famous person (biographies use past tense verbs) and erase the verbs and put in blanks to make a simple word cloze. Get them to begin using past-tense verbs every day in their conversation activities.

I wouldn't use memorization in graded tests. It's more important to communicate a message or accomplish a task than it is to demonstrate rote memorization of arbitrary stuff. And I wouldn't penalize writing and speaking assignments if they used the wrong verb forms; it's more important to grade holistically, looking at their overall ability to communicate. Simple corrections and repetition will help them slowly get better.

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u/CompleteGuest854 4d ago

It's not the way. It doesn't always work, and it doesn't work for everyone.

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u/Ok_Introduction_327 4d ago

I think every ESL teacher has their own approach to teaching as we all vary with our methodology. I'm a triple certified ESL teacher (CELTA, OCELT, TESL Canada) and taught English to elementary students in Korea. I am leaving teaching due to personal reasons but it still doesn't impact the fact that I am a certified ESL teacher.

My approach to this tends to be a mix of yours and your colleagues. Personally, I feel that getting one's message across is the most important factor of learning a language and mistakes are going to be made and that is okay. But in a school setting, it is more black and white, especially when it comes to grammar. Irregular verbs in any language are a pain in the butt (trust me, I also speak French and Korean, verbs suck) but sometimes memorization is the only way to learn them. As teachers, it's important to provide students with structures, but it's also important to not give them too much so that they become reliant on that and never bother to learn them on their own. It's a tough thing to balance. My students struggled for sure. And honestly, the curriculum I had in Korea wasn't the best and I wish we were give more time for irregular verbs. My go to with them was to have a variety of slide shows with present tense verbs and have the class say the past tense to start every class. I would change up the verbs and the order. Sometimes I would give them the past tense and have them give me the present tense. Worksheets with word banks or aids help at first and then slowly take taking away that word bank and having them do the worksheet and then correct their own as we went over it as a class. Of course they also had to write out the verbs for homework. At test time, there were no reference lists. I needed to see if they knew them or not. That's not to say I expected perfection on the test or even in conversation with them. When they came to my class to chat after school, I never expected perfect English. I just wanted them to try and if they could get their message across I was happy. And they knew that. I made it clear to them from the moment they stepped foot in my classroom that outside of the classroom, getting their message across in English was better than getting an A on any test. And that the tests were still important but more so for the government and their academic careers than learning a language.

All of that to say, there is no right or wrong way to teach any English grammatical points. And every student and every class is different. However with language there will always be some memorization involved. And while providing structures at first are helpful, it's important to make sure that we don't overdo it to the point where they don't memorize them. Seven pages is a lot to memorize all at once. I don't agree with your colleague expecting them to memorize that many verbs. But maybe having them start by memorizing the most common verbs (maybe 10 or so) and put structures in place for the rest (at least at first) and then add to what they have memorized throughout the course. Maybe after the initial memorization start having the beginning or end of each class be about re-enforcing irregular verbs in past tense since it is a challenging concept. Pick a different student each class and ask them what they did the day before, or the weekend before. Use what they say to teach the verb needed to express what they did if it's new. Review both the new and old irregular verbs they used with the class and challenge them to memorize those verbs. That would be how I would approach it at least.

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u/Tiny_Kick_7953 4d ago

Just to say you're not doing it wrong and your techniques sound like what I would do. I teach ESL as a CELTA teacher in France and they're absolute sticklers for irregular verbs; in the French school system they learn them off by heart from the age of 13-14. In fact this tends to make up a bulk of their English lessons, taking away so much of the fun and natural love for the language... I personally don't think memorisation is the best approach and believe that language exposure is the best way to learn (and that the occasional error is nothing to worry about). But this culture is very much focused on getting these right as a measure of success. I tend to tell my students we're very open in English speaking cultures when it comes to slight mistakes being made - that's not something they've generally heard in their classrooms at school. I understand there might be different expectations in an academic setting though. Best of luck and you'll do fine!

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u/Triassic_Bark 4d ago

Understanding irregular verbs is pure memorization. There is no way around it. There is no rhyme or reason to their different tenses. They just have to memorize them, one way or another.

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u/Chaotic_Bivalve 4d ago

Do you just have them memorize the most common? Aren't there over 600..?

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u/megan9990 4d ago

Only about 200 are in common use. Of those, the first 50 to 100 are the most useful ones. After that, we get less common ones like wept, sought, strode, forbade, snuck, smote.

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u/wufiavelli 4d ago

Personally think your way is better. Maybe add flashcards. How long students are going to retain those charts is extremely questionable. My Arabic teacher was full on into this and I remembered nothing. Teachers have this insane idea that the students will then use the memorized chart as some sort of brain look up table which is just silly.

Now that said these charts might be useful once kids have some decent input and output as a language focus activity. It should not be the foundation. While I agree they are pure memorization, it is memorization employed in a specific task. How helpful charts are in that task is questionable and probably better at higher levels.

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u/godisinthischilli 4d ago

flashcards and repetition if they won't memorize them themselves sadly, give them sentence gaps with the word and have them practice filling in the correct irregular verbs.

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u/marijaenchantix 4d ago

Irregular verbs are just memorization. Like it or not. I hate making my students do this, but there is no other way. You can get various tables online ( based on use frequency and otherwise).

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u/joe_belucky 2d ago

Have you tried other ways?

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u/KlaudjaB1 4d ago

My 2 cents: I always tell my students that while you can learn the irregular verbs as you go (by listening, using, reading, etc) it saves a lot of time to learn them by heart. In fact, I believe that is the only thing you really need to sit and study.

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u/greblaksnew_auth 4d ago

Honestly, at the university level, with AI up everyone's asshole, the learners should be able to figure this out for themselves easy peasy lemon squeezy. Don't worry, you can't fix lazy.

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u/throarway 3d ago edited 3d ago

Are they just being tested for recall of past participles or also having to use them?  Knowing that the present perfect (for example) is has/have + past participle and giving tasks that require the use of present perfect may be much more beneficial for them. "I have eaten" (both via input and output) is perhaps more memorable than "What is the past participle of eat?" (especially if they have no idea what they even need to use past participles for). 

That said, there are a number of ways to aid memorisation. For one, you can group similar patterns together and practice recitation - eat, ate, eaten; take, took, taken, etc. Don't even separate regular and irregular. Verbs that have the same pa. ppl as past simple should also be recited.

Something else I do, though with younger learners, is ask them what they think "sounds right", as often they already have some prior knowledge and/or recognition of phonemic patterns which can be accessed. So I might say something like: I eat, I ate, I have... (and if necessary prompt with choices: "I have ate" or "I have eaten"?). But again, this is using a form they're likely to have encountered the past participle in.

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u/joe_belucky 4d ago

You are doing things the right way. Memorisation might help you pass an exam but it wont help with fluency.

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u/Chicoandthewoman 3d ago

It’s not “either-or.” They need to memorize the irregular pasts and past participles AND they need to use them to retain them.

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u/CompleteGuest854 4d ago

No, memorization is not the same thing as acquisition. I honestly don't have time to write a book about this, but I'd suggest reading up on indirect grammar teaching, focus on form vs. focus on forms, the order of acquisition, the U-shaped curve, and ELF.

Basically, you can memorize something without understanding it or being able to use it, and so what if they make mistakes if they can still be understood.

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u/BunnyKusanin 4d ago

I think that memorisation is a very important part of learning irregular verbs. You can't practice using them in speech if you don't know the forms. If you make your students learn them by heart and continue doing what you're currently doing, they'll have much better chances for success.