Understanding Sentence Times
When students study English sentence patterns in school, you are told three types of time:
•Past •Present •Future |
In addition, you are told about four types of aspect:
•Simple •Continuous •Perfect •Perfect Continuous |
In total, this forms 12 possible sentences. These are most clearly seen with the following table:
Most English students are familiar with this table. My students always confidently tell me that they know all these patterns.
However, I have noticed that most students cannot actually say when they should use these patterns.
Remember that sentence patterns, as much as vocabulary, express a specific meaning, a piece of information, to the reader. When we choose a sentence pattern, we are telling our reader something. So, what types of information does each sentence give?
Consider the question another way. There are 5 types of time that we can express with a sentence:
1.Now (right now) 2.Before (yesterday) 3.After (tomorrow) 4.Before/Now (yesterday and today) 5.Before/Now/After (always) |
What types of pattern express each time? Try to fill in the answers in the table below. Really try. I bet you cannot do it.
I noticed that most students confuse Present Simple and Present Continuous. Most students don’t know where “4” should go. Almost every student puts “1” or “5” in the wrong place. How did you do?
Most schools spend an equal amount of time on each of the 12 sentence patterns. Are they really equally useful? I did some “Google News” searches to see which phrases are more common. Here are the results for “do”:
(Note: Percentages take into account overlapping search results.)
Hmm. It certainly looks like some patterns are a lot more useful than others. Let’s look at some other common verbs.
When we compare all these results, we get a new graph that looks something like this:
So what should you study? How should you use your time? Well, the following graph shows us approximately 90% of all sentence patterns, based on frequency of use.
Conclusions
•Spend 90% of your time practicing these five patterns:
•Before you translate a sentence into English, try to label each part of the sentence (each verb) with a number 1-5. •When you write a sentence in English, try to label each part of the sentence (each verb) with a number 1-5. These numbers should be the same in every language since the MEANING of the sentence should be the same in every language. |