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26 Oct 2010

Past Simple vs. Past Continuous; stative & dynamic verbs; -ed ending

Hello there!

Here I leave you with some interesting material from the Internet to revise some of the things we covered in class last week. First of all you have an episode from The Flatmates, a series by the BBC where they focus on different aspects of the English language.


Click on this link and you'll be able to listen to it (you'll see that you can listen either with or without the tapescript in front of you). After you listen, click on the "language point", where you have an explanation of how the past simple and continuous are used in the same sentence. Then you can practise doing the "quiz".




We already know that the past simple and the past continuous are used for different purposes. However, remember also that some verbs cannot be used in the continuous form... can you remember which ones they are?
...
That's right! Stative or non-action verbs! If you don't remember this, or you simply want to revise, click on the following link.

To end with, a final note on pronunciation. Last week we saw that regular verbs in the past simple end in -ed. However, these two small letters can be pronounced in three different ways: /id/, /t/ and /d/:



Here you have a listening where we find out about these three pronunciations and we also listen to Sebastian, a student from Colombia, producing the correct sounds.



As you can see, in order to pronounce the -ed ending correctly it is important to know which sounds are voiced and which are voiceless/unvoiced, but... how do we know? I hope this video helps! :)

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