Tenses - Past Continuous

Detective: "Can you account for your movements last night, Sir?"

Suspect: "As a matter of fact, detective, I was making love all evening."

Detective: "At your age Sir?"

Students need to know

This describes an action in progress at or during a time in the past. It is commonly found in combination with the Past Simple:

“I was having a bath when the phone rang.”

“Did you get out and answer it?”

“I tried, but I was so startled, I slipped and shattered my tibia.”

In this case it can be thought of as "setting the scene" or providing the background to the "main" events. We often think of this sort of construction as the ‘interrupted past’ – though of course, the same structure would apply even if the bather in the example had decided simply to carry on and ignore the phone.

Students struggle with

Choosing between, and switching between, past simple and continuous. In the students' language "I went" and "I was going" may be the same. Even if they are different, "simple" and "continuous" are often used very differently. It is therefore rare to find a student who can use this accurately.

Generative situations

Power cut. Interrupted past. Describe a house with several rooms and a large family. Establish that you’re talking about yesterday evening. Show pictures for what each person was doing. Say there was a sudden power cut. Then elicit sentences: “When the power cut happened, Mary was painting her nails, Marvin was playing the guitar…”

Practice

Murder mystery.

Provide (or get students to draw) a plan of a large house, including 6 rooms and places: living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, bathroom and garden. SS list in note form six activities for each room or garden: make bread, clean dishes, watch TV, water plants etc. Each list is placed in the room to which it relates. Tell students there has been a murder. Tell them when the murder took place. You need a dice. Number the rooms 1 to 6. Players throw the dice and do a mini detective and suspect role-play, the alibi being chosen from the list for the corresponding room.

Player throws a 3 and 3= kitchen, so

Detective: What were you doing at 8 o’clock?

Player: I was making bread in the kitchen.

‘Make bread’ is then crossed off so that particular alibi cannot be used again. If the next player lands in the Kitchen, they must make a different alibi, and that activity is then crossed off. The game proceeds until a player lands in a room with no remaining activities. They have no alibi, and are therefore the ‘murderer’. That is the end of the game.

Note: The role of Detective moves with each turn to ensure everyone has the opportunity to form the question. Optionally, the detective can recap all the previous alibis given by that player:

Detective: I don’t believe you. You told me you were watering flowers in the garden, then you were working in the study, then you were cleaning dishes in the kitchen.

Player: No, I remember now. I was definitely making bread in the kitchen.

Bickering kids

This activity is most memorable if done with realia so, in the lesson before, if possible ask students to bring in a child’s toy of some kind. Failing that, a common item of stationery, like a ruler, will do. Get students to place their items on the floor or table in the middle of the room. Then elicit from the class a list of verbs relevant to the items: play, build, draw, paint, use, and write these on the board. Next elicit a typical exchange if one child attempts to take a toy before another has finished with it!

Child A: “Hey! I was playing with that!”

Child B: “No, you weren’t.”

Child A: “Yes, I was. I was painting a fireman.”…. and so on.

Students then role play children arguing over a toy or item of stationery. Encourage them to steal as many different items from as many different other children as possible thus maximizing practice (and emulating the real world of the nursery.) Note the natural use of past continuous, and its short Yes/No reply.

Witness statements

SS watch a short video clip of a crime or incident of some sort. To make it realistic, they only see it once, and are not primed as to what they will be watching. They then write a statement for the police: “I was standing on the other side of the road when I saw two men enter the bank. One man was wearing blue jeans….”. The statements are then passed around and compared for accuracy. They can then re-view the clip. Lots of incidental past continuous use.

"stop" with photo on IWB

You’ll need a camera or phone. Some students work in pairs, others individually. Give them each an action to mime, for example, playing tennis, playing basketball, arguing, climbing a mountain, cleaning the car etc. It is important that they don’t know what other activities have been given out. Have students move into the middle of the room. Get yourself into a position where you can take in the whole scene. Get the students to mime their activity all at the same time. Your job is to take a photo which captures everyone in mid-action. Having successfully done this, the students can stop their activity and sit down.

You then need somehow to display the photo. Working in pairs, the students must now write down what they think everyone was doing when the picture was taken, based on how they appear in the still picture. “He was ----, They were ---.” Feedback could be as simple as pairs saying what they were doing, or more complex, with them re-doing their mime, which would lead to a pleasant contrast of present and past continuous:

"You’re playing table tennis. We thought you were having a fight!”