The past and perfect tenses in English
We reviewed the various past tenses and their roles in English and noted how:
- English show signs of being a creole language because it has a much simpler tense formation system than its relatives.
- the simplification of the present perfect to
to have
+past participle
has freed the structureto be
+past participle
to be used for the passive form and thus enabling simple passive construction and hence building the way for English speakers to use a lot more passive constructions in their everyday speech. - the present perfect is about things in the past that either are:
- continuing until now
- have an impact on the present
- the future perfect where something in the past has an impact on the future is rarely used.
“Corpus spots”
There are yellow sections in the text book called Corpus spots and they are analyses of the text corpus that Cambridge English holds about of the answers candidates have given in exam questions over the years.
The book uses these to show common mistakes that students make in the CPE exam. I do not find these as helpful as the writers seem to do so I will ignore them in the book.
Adjective formation
Making adjectives out of nouns and nouns out of verbs etc. is part of the everyday bread and butter of the CPE student’s life and is especially important in paper 1 part 3 where there is a word formation cloze test.
I will try and bring a hand-out on this subject matter to the next lesson on 27 March 2014.
Summarising
First you should watch the Monty Python Summarizing Proust Competition
Summarising is a skill that is is required in paper 2 part 1 the compulsory writing activity where you are given two “short” texts and are asked to summarise and comment on them.
Key ideas that are important in this task are:
- selecting key ideas – using a highlighter pen or just underlining with a pen or pencil to make it clear.
- redrafting these ideas in different words – choosing them so that the meaning is conveyed in less words than the original.
Homework (for 27 February 2014)
The homework task you need to carry out are:
- finish off the exercises on page 13
- page 14 (first part of Exam folder 1) complete the word formation cloze practice.
Room on 27 February 2014
I have booked room 257 again for that session but it will be our last in that room as another course arrives there in March. Still check the notices though.