Consideration on Understanding Tenses

Some Considerations and Practical Steps

            In order to get the great advantages from using short story in understanding tense of English, therefore the teachers should take some considerations as follow:

1.  Preparation

            Preparation step is important to ensure that everything runs smoothly. In preparing the teaching material, the teacher may take into account the following things:

-    Selecting  certain tense to be taught

Selecting the type of tense to be discussed is an important initial step to be conducted. It is aimed at limiting a broad discussion of tense and aspect that may lead to confusion. A single tense and some aspects or a single aspect and some tenses can be the combination in this selection process.

-     Measuring the level of students’ comprehension

It means that the teachers should accurately measure the level of students’ comprehensions toward the text. Simply, it can be indicated by the percentage of words from the text that can be understood by the students. Understanding the text well will be a prerequisite to understand the use of tense and aspect of English. Therefore, by assessing the level of students’ comprehension, teachers can select a proper text. This consideration is also to adjust the level of text difficulty with the students’ comprehension. In this sense, ‘difficult’ refers to the complicatedness of word and the type of sentences. It is based on the reason that understanding tense and aspect will be better done from simple or compound sentences.

-    Measuring the length of the text

The length of text will be the last influencing consideration. It is better for teacher to select a text which can be finished in an allocated time in order to keep the unity of the story. Therefore, teachers can select either short-short story or long-short story as long as it meets time allocation.

            Finding a short story that meets above considerations sometimes is not an easy matter. Therefore, if it is necessary, the teachers can compose their own story to fulfill above requirements. When a short story that matches above requirements is available, the teacher can proceed by doing the following steps:

2. Teaching

            After the teaching material is available based on above consideration, the following activities can be considered in teaching process:

1. Explain to the students abut the tense to be discussed.
2. Give a brief review about the story to be discussed. In this step, teachers give the summary of the story in a sequence of times. It is important to underline the correct tense used in different time sequence.
3. Ask the students to read the whole story as well as to take a note of the difficult words
4. Make sure the students have really understood the story by giving some simple questions related to the series of actions or events in that story.
5. Give a brief theoretical explanation about the tense and aspect related to how they used in sentences.
6. Ask the student to find out the explained tense in the story by marking the predicate (verb) of tense that indicate the tense.

3. Evaluation

            Evaluating students’ performance in using tense appropriately can be done at the end of each session. Evaluation session can be simply done by asking the students to apply the studied tense in difference context of sentences.

            Evaluating students understanding about studied tense can also be done in various activities that enlarge students’ four basic language skills such as listening, reading, speaking or writing. The creativity of the teacher will be the influential factor in determining students’ success.

            Having sufficient knowledge about tense of English is extremely important for English young learners, since tense becomes an important part of English as tenseness language.

            Conventional teaching of tense needs improving to ensure both conceptual and practical understanding of tense among young learners. Therefore, an appropriate media plays significant role to help this effort. Short story can be a promising media to help students to understand English tense. It is due to the nature of short story that exposes action or event in a sequence of time. Time sequence is an important thing deals with tense and aspect. Further, a short story will give a clear context in which certain tense and aspect are used.

            Incorporating a short story in understanding tense for English young learners should be done in such a way to ensure the clarity of the theoretical concept that is applied in contextual sentences.  The ways proposed in this paper are basically supposed to be useful for English young learners.