FOR ESL TEACHERS: Sentence Structure

The regular ESL classroom in the United States is comprised of many different students from different countries and language backgrounds. In my classroom, I had students who spoke Arabic, Korean, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese. These students all came with different ideas how sentences are to be structured. These ideas of how a sentence should be made are a part of them and how they communicate, so just simply telling them how a simple present or past progressive verb works doesn’t always help a student. For Chinese students, they don’t have verb tenses. For Spanish speakers, they don’t often use subjects of their sentences. And for Korean students, their sentences are Subject-Object-Verb, not Subject-Verb-Object.

Many students have issues with understanding 1). how the sentence is structured and 2). how the sentence can change based on if it is affirmative, negative or a question. With beginner students, it is important to drill them with the subject-verb-object structure so that they can understand how a sentence works and that every sentence must have a subject and a verb. But for many more advanced students, you might hear them make basic grammatical mistakes that seem far beneath their ability. This could be because they never learned basic sentence structure when they first learned English, so they have bad habits that have become fossilized. They might consistently say, “I no saw that movie” instead of “I didn’t see that movie.” Many Spanish speakers say no + verb because it’s a literal translation from Spanish to English and they never learn the difference.

In my ESL classroom, I emphasize learning the sentence structures every time I introduce a new verb tense. For example, when I teach simple present, I have students write positive and negative sentences, and yes/no and information questions, like this:

Verb: Eat
Positive: I eat dinner.
Negative: I don’t eat dinner.
Yes/No Question: Do you eat dinner?
Information Question: What do you eat?

For simple present, I’ll have them practice with different subjects to know how to change the verb to match third-person singular. I will have them do this for all verb tenses every time they learn a new one and have them repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition is their best ally at this stage because they need to wire their brain to start thinking in this structure. So if I teach simple future, we will do all verb tenses together like this:

Verb: Eat
Simple Present:
Positive: I eat dinner.
Negative: I don’t eat dinner.
Yes/No Question: Do you eat dinner?
Information Question: What do you eat?
Present Progressive:
Positive: I am eating dinner.
Negative: I am not eating dinner.
Yes/No Question: Are you eating dinner?
Information Question: What are you eating?
Simple Past:
Positive: I ate dinner.
Negative: I didn’t eat dinner.
Yes/No Question: Did you eat dinner?
Information Question: What did you eat?
Present Progressive:
Positive: I was eating dinner.
Negative: I was not eating dinner.
Yes/No Question: Were you eating dinner?
Information Question: What were you eating?
Simple Future with will:
Positive: I will eat dinner.
Negative: I will not eat dinner.
Yes/No Question: Will you eat dinner?
Information Question: What will you eat?
Simple Future with be going to:
Positive: I am going to eat dinner.
Negative: I am not going to eat dinner.
Yes/No Question: Are you going to eat dinner?
Information Question: What are you going to eat?

I will give students 10-20 verbs and have them repeat this process with each verb until this is something that starts to feel rote. Students can compare their sentences with the examples given by the teacher and start to set some habits on correct sentence structures. This is also useful for the perfect tenses.

One packet that I have available is below. This gives structures and explanations for each verb tense and practice sheets. You can print these out or send them to students as PDFs to practice on their own here. This is something that I feel gives students a great foundation for grammar and for their writing.

ESL Verb Tense Sentence Writing Packet by Jeremiah Hawn English | TPT (teacherspayteachers.com)