How to help your students learn Irregular verbs

Make a long story short, there are so many ways and methods of how to learn Irregular verbs. According to multiple intelligences theory there are several types of learners so you’ll never know which activity would work better for your students until you try. Feel free to improvise with your students testing new exercises and challenges. I’ve collected my favourite activities below:

1. Visual activities

There are several activities that can easily be adapted to practise past tense verbs. The most popular activities are:

— Gaps filling

— Sentence completion

— Crosswords

— ‘Odd one out’ game:

— You can also play ‘Present Simple-Past Simple-Present Perfect chain’ game:

2. Quizzes and Games

— Bingo Prepare a grid with nine past forms or infinitive verbs. Start reading out verbs at random. If the student hears the past form of a verb (or infinitive) they have on their grid, they cross it out. The first to cross out all the verbs on the grid calls ‘bingo’ – and wins. Follow this up by asking students to work in pairs and to ask each other questions using the verbs on their grid.

— Memory game Prepare a set of cards with the infinitive on them, and a set of cards with the past tense on them. Put both sets face down on a table. Students should pick up two cards and decide if they match. If they match, students keep them. If they don’t match students show them to the others and put them back down. A follow up using the verbs to create a story can be done.
Use this website in your online lessons or extra homework for students.

Jeopardy Quiz Show Adapt any Quiz Shows your students like! Here is an example of interactive Jeopardy quiz.

3. Flashcards and lists

One more option to practice irregular verbs is to work with flashcards which might be assigned as self-study materials. Students can write irregular verbs on the pieces of paper and past form on the back of them. As an alternative, they use online tools like englishpage.com/irregularverbs

Feel free to provide your students with downloadable lists of Irregular verbs, but don’t overload them, give only lists of most frequent Irregular verbs or the ones which they need for the lessons. Your students can use Hilfen group Verbs or Grouped verbs to remember them better.

4. Videos and music

For Audio and Musical Learners implement videos and songs into the lessons. There are lots of great resources, make the most of them! Here are some of them:

— Learn English ESL Irregular Verbs Grammar Rap Song!

— The cat song

— Irregular Verbs in English – Groups 1 & 2 and Group 3

— How to Pronounce the Irregular Verbs in British Accent| British English Pronunciation

5. Ask to ‘investigate’

Ask students to imagine that they are linguists, they should find out more about the irregular verbs by themselves. Wiki provides a lot of information on forms, including archaic and dialectal, strong and weak forms, extra notes.

EnglishPage gives a complete list of irregular verbs. What’s more, if you click any verb, you’ll be redirected to the page where they show N-dictionaries with English definitions that include the target verb, definitions in various fields (for example, Medicine, Business, etc.), extra features (such as Origin, Synonyms, etc.)

How do you practice Irregular verbs with your students?