Today I met with Abdulrahman during the lunch break and we went over some verb constructions. This was the first time I met with Abdulrahman but it seemed as if he was excited to meet me. He already had a bunch of questions for me in his head. We started with basic introductions. Abdulrahman is from Saudi Arabia and his family lives there. He is traveling back there in two days to see them before coming back for the Fall. I told Abdulrahman that I am studying Italian and German and he was pretty impressed by that. We didn’t talk for too long about ourselves because I could tell that Abdulrahman had a lot of questions so I suggested that we get started. Abdulrahman asked me about the difference between present perfect tense and the pluperfect tense. He asked not only how to construct them but also when to use each one. I explained with the help of the two pages below how to do this.
I took out a sheet of paper and wrote “present perfect” on the left and “pluperfect” on the right. I always feel that when explaining something you should write it down so the student can always look back for reference and doesn’t have to remember every detail that you say. I explained that both tenses use an auxiliary verb with the past participle but only the auxiliary verb changes between the two forms. I wrote “have/has + past participle” on the left and “had + past participle” on the right. Then I followed with examples for each one. We focused on present perfect first. I gave Abdulrahman some examples and wrote them out. I explained that you use present perfect with several different cases but the most common are unfinished actions, recent actions in the past with results in the present, and talking about experiences. He then repeated some examples to me and wrote a few down.
For the pluperfect, I used timelines to explain that you use it when talking about an action in the past that has happened before another action in the past. When I first explained this I could tell that Abdulrahman was very confused so that is when I wrote the timeline down. It looked like this “----------|----------|--------” with each vertical line being an action in the past. I used the example from the website “Stephanie had already left when Philippe arrived” but I changed “she” to Stephanie to make it easier. This example seemed to help a lot. I used the first line to indicate Stephanie leaving and the second line to indicate Philippe arriving. Abdulrahman came up with another examples using me arriving at CIES today. He said “I was talking to my friends after you had already arrived.” I said to him that he just created a perfect example of the pluperfect and I could tell that he felt accomplished. Overall this was a very helpful session, I got to try out some methods that I have been learning from to teach. I hope I get to meet with Abdulrahman again before he leaves.
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