Promoting education and achievement of adults learning English
Reading and Adult English Language Learners: The Role of the First Language
Miriam Burt and Joy Peyton
National Center for ESL Literacy Education
The ability to read is a critical skill for adults in the United States. Educators Grabe and Stoller (2002) assert, "As we enter a new century, productive and educated citizens will require even stronger literacy abilities (including both reading and writing) in increasingly larger numbers of societal settings" (p. 1). However, most research on reading development has focused on English-speaking children in preschool through Grade 12. (See, for example, the results of the National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998.) Little research on reading involves adults learning English as a second (or additional) language.
In a review of the research published from 1980-2000 on reading development among adult English language learners in the United States (aged 16 years and older), Adams and Burt (2002) found only 47 studies that addressed this category of learners. Of those, only 24 were carried out in non-postsecondary education settings (adult education programs, community-based programs, and workplace literacy programs). The others were carried out in college-based intensive English programs (IEP). Although the relevant body of research is small and preliminary, it does give us valuable information about second language (L2) learners in adult education programs and points to areas in which further research is needed. (See Adams & Burt, 2002, and Burt, Peyton, & Adams, 2003, for a description of these populations and of the types of studies included in the review.)
The Adult English Language Learner Population
The adult English language learner population is large. In 2001, 42% (over 1 million) of adults enrolled in state-administered, federally funded adult education programs were enrolled in English as a second language (ESL) classes. This was a 4% increase from 2000, when 38% of the participants were enrolled in ESL classes (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). English language learners are also served in adult basic education (ABE) and adult secondary education (ASE) classes, private language schools, and in programs sponsored by community-based organizations and volunteer literacy organizations such as ProLiteracy.
These adults come from diverse backgrounds and have widely differing experiences with literacy in their first languages. A number of factors influence the ways that adults' English literacy develops and the progress that different learners will make in learning to read English. They include level of literacy in the first language and in English, oral language proficiency in English, educational background, personal goals for learning English, and the structure and writing system of the first language. These factors must be taken into account in all areas of instructional program planning, learner placement in classes, and instructional approaches. This paper describes how one of these factors-literacy in the first language-can affect the acquisition of reading skills in English and the ways that instruction should be delivered.
Literacy in the First (Native) Language
Huntley (1992) describes four types of literacy in the first language (L1) that affect English literacy development and should be considered in adult ESL literacy instruction: preliterate, nonliterate, semiliterate, and non-Roman alphabet literate. Birch (2002) adds to these types nonalphabet literate. Birch and others (Hilferty, 1996; Strucker, 2002) add Roman alphabet literate. These six types of L1 literacy and their impact on English language learners' development of English language literacy are discussed here in the sections on Limited Literate Learners and Literate Learners.
Limited Literate Learners
Preliterate learners come from cultures where literacy is uncommon in everyday life because the language is not written, has only recently been written, or is being developed. For example, most Bantu people of Somalia are preliterate in their native Af-Maay because it has been codified for just a short time (Van Lehman & Eno, 2002). Preliterate English language learners often have had little or no exposure to written text and may not be aware of the purposes of literacy in everyday life. Traditionally, literacy instruction for preliterate learners builds on their oral language knowledge and is supported by oral language activities (Carroll, 1999). Preliterate learners generally progress slowly in literacy and other language instruction and require re-teaching of skills and concepts (Robson, 1982; Strucker, 2002). Some who never attended school as children may be unfamiliar with school culture and its attendant behaviors and expectations.
Nonliterate learners come from cultures where literacy is available, but they have not had access to literacy instruction, often because of their socioeconomic status. For example, some adult learners from Central America may not know how to read or write in their native Spanish because of disrupted schooling due to war and poverty. These learners have probably had some exposure to written language and may have a greater awareness of the value and uses of literacy than preliterate learners. These learners may be reluctant to disclose their limited literacy background in class, and instruction with them may proceed slowly. They may learn classroom content more slowly than other learners, because they cannot make full use of textbooks, other printed materials, and class notes for review. However, they are often highly motivated to learn.
Semiliterate learners usually have had access to literacy in their native culture, but because of their socioeconomic status or educational situation, they have not achieved a high level of literacy in their native language. Like nonliterate learners, they may have left school at a young age for economic or political reasons, as was the case with many Southeast Asian refugees and Central American immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s (Holt, 1995; Ranard & Pfleger, 1995).
Two studies suggest that either previous or simultaneous acquisition of L1 literacy can have a positive impact on English literacy development among these populations. Robson (1982), in a study of Hmong learners of English at a refugee camp in Thailand, found that adults with minimal literacy in Hmong acquired English reading skills more rapidly than those who had no Hmong literacy. Similarly, a study of adult Haitians learning English in New York City (Burtoff, 1985) found that those who received native language literacy instruction while learning English developed stronger literacy skills in the L2 than did the English-only group, even though the total number of instructional hours for the two groups was equal. Although strong conclusions cannot be drawn from these studies due to the small number of students involved and the nonexperimental nature of the study design, this research points to the need to examine the value of native language literacy instruction prior to or at the same time as L2 literacy instruction.
Researchers are now identifying students who have been educated primarily in the United States but have characteristics similar to those described above. Referred to as "Generation 1.5" learners, they have immigrated to the United States where they have attended schools and developed oral fluency in English. However, they are not literate in their native language, and they struggle with reading and writing in English. They may remain in ESL classes throughout their elementary and secondary school education and enter ESL programs as adults or need special attention in college programs (Harklau, Losey, & Siegal, 1999).
Many preliterate, nonliterate, and semiliterate learners, including Generation 1.5 learners, may approach English literacy learning with trepidation. They need to be given opportunities to increase their self-confidence in educational situations and to develop positive images of themselves as readers (Goldberg, 1997). Many have high oral skills in English and may have had positive experiences with learning through oral ESL instruction.
Learners who are literate in some writing system have the advantage of experience with deciphering and assigning meaning to print and using print to enhance their learning. Learners who are nonalphabet literate read a language that is written logographically, such as Chinese and Japanese. These learners may try to read in English by memorizing whole words. A study of 16 Russian and 11 Japanese learners in an intensive English program (IEP) at a Canadian university and 16 Russian learners of English in a university in Israel (Wade-Woolley, 1999) found that the Japanese learners, who use both a syllabary (kana) and a logographic (kanji) writing system relied more on English word recognition than did the Russian learners, who use a phonologically based alphabet. Wade-Woolley concluded that because the Japanese readers were not used to focusing on phoneme-to-sound mapping in reading, they were more likely than the Russian learners to depend on sight recognition of letter sequences. Learners who depend on whole word recognition to the exclusion of phonological decoding will not become proficient readers in alphabetic languages. Like children (as described in the National Reading Panel report, 2000), in order to become good readers in English, adult readers must develop an "alphabetical strategy" (Birch, 2002, p. 33); they must be able to process an alphabetic script in the way it was designed to be used (Adams, 1990).
Non-Roman alphabet literate learners read in a language that uses a non-Roman alphabet, such as Cyrillic or Thai, but that is still phonetically based. These learners have the advantage of being accustomed to reading with an alphabet, but they may struggle to find words in the dictionary and may need time to process written materials presented in class because the orthography of their L1 is different from that of English. For example, Nepali students, whose Sanskrit-derived letters descend below the lines of text, may, at first, attempt to direct their visual attention below the lines of English text where only the "tails" of some English letters (g, j, p, and y) are written (Strucker, 2002). In addition to directionality issues (their alphabet reads right to left; the Roman alphabet, left to right), Arabic students learning to read in English are likely to have problems with vowels, which are usually not written out in everyday Arabic writings (Ryan & Meara, 1991). Strategies that these learners may have developed to read Arabic (e.g., proficient Arabic and Hebrew readers rely on context to determine which vowel sounds to assign to words) may not work as well in English reading and spelling, where vowels must be attended to (Birch, 2002).
Both of these groups of learners have valuable reading skills in the first language that they may be able to transfer to second language reading, but they need direct, systematic, sequential instruction in the sound-to-symbol correspondences of written English, rather than merely addressing sound-symbol issues as they arise (Strucker, 2002).
Many adult ESL students are literate in a Roman alphabetic language (e.g., Spanish or Serbo Croatian). Like those literate in a non-Roman script or in a logographic script, these learners have already developed reading skills and formed reading behaviors in their L1. They know that written language can represent speech. Their educational background and literacy skills may be an important part of their self-image. They can study English texts, take notes in class to learn new vocabulary or structures, and read outside of class. The English alphabet will be more familiar to them than to others whose native language does not use the Roman alphabet; many of them may appear to have little difficulty reading English, especially those from languages such as Spanish that have many cognates with English.
Yet Roman-alphabet-literate learners still need to learn English sound-symbol correspondences before they are able to read well (Hilferty, 1996; Strucker, 2002). They need to know that English does not have the same level of correspondence between sound and written form that other orthographies or spelling systems do-that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between letter and sound. For example, some letters are pronounced more than one way depending on the letters/sounds that follow (e.g., c in citation and car), and some sounds are represented by more than one letter (e.g., the hard /k/ sound can be written as c, k, or ck, often depending on the letters/sounds that precede and follow it). Sometimes letters in English are silent as are the g and h in right. At the syllabic level, readers should learn, for example, that the combination ough can be pronounced as in tough and rough or as in bought and sought. Readers also need to learn the many pronunciations of vowels, including their sounds in stressed and unstressed syllables.
Conclusion Learning to read is not easy, and it is especially difficult for adults learning to read in an L2. Research suggests that all English language learners, regardless of the type of L1 literacy in their background, need direct teaching in the English symbol system and in English sound-symbol correspondences. Previously learned reading strategies, learners' experiences and access to literacy, and the nature of their L1 written language contribute to the speed and ease with which learners will acquire L2 literacy. These factors, as well as English proficiency levels, should be considered in instruction of adults learning to read English.
Types of L1 Literacy and Effects on L2 Literacy Learning
|L1 Literacy||Explanation||Special Considerations|
|Preliterate||L1 has no written form (e.g., many American indigenous, African, Australian, and Pacific languages).||Learners need exposure to the purposes and uses of literacy.|
|Nonliterate||Learners have no access to literacy instruction.||Learners may feel stigmatized.|
|Semiliterate||Learners have limited access to literacy instruction.||Learners may have had past negative experiences with literacy learning.|
|Nonalphabet literate||Learners are fully literate in a language written in a nonalphabetic script (e.g., Chinese).||Learners need instruction in reading an alphabetic script and in the sound-syllable correspondences in English.|
|Non-Roman alphabet literate||Learners are literate in a language written in a non-Roman alphabet (e.g., Arabic, Greek, Korean, Russian, and Thai).||Learners need instruction in the Roman alphabet in order to transfer their L1 literacy skills to English. Some, such as readers of Arabic, will need to learn to read from left to right.|
|Roman alphabet literate||Learners are fully literate in a language written in a Roman alphabet script (e.g., French, German, and Spanish). They read from left to right and recognize letter shapes and fonts.||Learners need instruction in the specific letter-to-sound and sound-syllable correspondences of English.|
From Reading and Adult English Language Learners: A Review of the Research, by M. Burt, J. K. Peyton, and R. Adams, 2003, Washington, DC: National Center for ESL Literacy Education and Center for Applied Linguistics. Reprinted with permission.
Adams, M. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adams, R., & Burt, M. (2002). Research on reading development of adult English language learners: An annotated bibliography. Washington, DC: National Center for ESL Literacy Education. Retrieved January 15, 2003, from http://www.cal.org/caela/readingbib
Birch, B. M. (2002). English L2 reading: Getting to the bottom. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Burt, M., Peyton, J. K., & Adams, R. (2003). Reading and adult English language learners: A review of the research. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Burtoff, M. (1985). The Haitian Creole literacy evaluation study (Final Report). New York: Ford Foundation.
Carroll, S. D. (1999, March). Storytelling for literacy. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Michigan Reading Association, Grand Rapids, MI. (EDRS No. ED430234)
Goldberg, R. (1997). Deconstructing the great wall of print. Connections: A Journal of Adult Literacy, 7, 8-13.
Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (2002).Teaching and researching reading. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
Harklau, L., Losey, K. M., & Siegal, M. (1999). Generation 1.5 meets college composition: Issues in the teaching of writing to U.S.-educated learners of ESL. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hilferty, A. G. (1996). Coding decoding: Predicting the reading comprehension of Latino adults learning English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Holt, G. M. (1995). Teaching low-level adult ESL learners. ERIC Digest. Washington, DC: National Center for ESL Literacy Education. Retrieved January 10, 2003, from http://www.cal.org/caela/digests/holt.htm (EDRS No. ED379965)
Huntley, H. S. (1992). The new illiteracy: A study of the pedagogic principles of teaching English as a second language to nonliterate adults. Unpublished manuscript. (EDRS No. ED356685)
National Reading Panel. (2000, April). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Pub. No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Retrieved January 23, 2003, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm
Ranard, D. A., & Pfleger, M. (1995). From the classroom to the community: A fifteen-year experiment in refugee education. Washington, DC, & McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics & Delta Systems.
Robson, B. (1982). Hmong literacy, formal education, and their effects on performance in an ESL class. In B. T. Downing & D. P. Olney (Eds.), The Hmong in the West: Observations and reports (pp. 201- 225). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Ryan, A., & Meara, P. (1991). The case of the invisible vowels: Arabic speakers reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language, 7, 531-540.
Snow, C., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Strucker, J. (2002, June). NCSALL's adult reading components study (ARCS). Paper presented at the conference of the International Dyslexia Association, Washington, DC.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, Division of Adult Education and Literacy. (2002, April 8). State-administered adult education program 2001 enrollment,. Washington, DC: Author.
Van Lehman, D., & Eno, O. (2002). The Somali Bantu: Their history and culture. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Retrieved January 10, 2003, from http://www.culturalorientation.net/bantu
Wade-Woolley, L. (1999). First language influences on second language word reading: All roads lead to Rome. Language Learning, 49, 447-471.
This brief is excerpted and adapted from Reading and Adult English Language Learners: A Review of the Research, by M. Burt, J. K. Peyton, & R. Adams, 2003, Washington, DC: National Center for ESL Literacy Education & Center for Applied Linguistics.
This document was produced at the Center for Applied Linguistics (4646 40th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20016 202-362-0700) with funding from the U.S. Department of Education (ED), Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), under Contract No. ED-99-CO-0008. The opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of ED. This document is in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission.


By Carl F. Young
Tonghak, or Eastern Learning, was the first major new religion in modern Korean history. Founded in 1860, it combined aspects of a variety of Korean religious traditions. Because of its appeal to the poor and marginalized, it became best known for its prominent role in the largest peasant rebellion in Korean history in 1894, which set the stage for a wider regional conflict, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Although the rebellion failed, it caused immense changes in Korean society and played a part in the war that ended in Japan's victory and its eventual rise as an imperial power.
It was in this context of social change and an increasingly perilous international situation that Tonghak rebuilt itself, emerging as Ch'ŏndogyo (Teaching of the Heavenly Way) in 1906. During the years before Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910, Ch'ŏndogyo continued to evolve by engaging with new currents in social and political thought, strengthening its institutions, and using new communication technologies to spread its religious and political message. In spite of Korea's loss of independence, Ch'ŏndogyo would endure and play a major role in Korean nationalist movements in the Japanese colonial period, most notably the March First independence demonstrations in 1919. It was only able to thrive thanks to the processes that had taken place in the twilight years of Korean independence.
This book focuses on the internal developments in the Tonghak and Ch'ŏndogyo movements between 1895 and 1910. Drawing on a variety of sources in several languages such as religious histories, doctrinal works, newspapers, government reports, and foreign diplomatic reports, it explains how Tonghak survived the turmoil following the failed 1894 rebellion to set the foundations for Ch'ŏndogyo's important role in the Japanese colonial period. The story of Tonghak and Ch'ŏndogyo not only is an example of how new religions interact with their surrounding societies and how they consolidate and institutionalize themselves as they become more established; it also reveals the processes by which Koreans coped and engaged with the challenges of social, political, and economic change and the looming darkness that would result in the extinguishing of national independence at the hands of Japan's expanding empire.
Carl F. Young is associate professor in the history department at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.
Edited by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid
288 pages; 21 illustrations
Death and the activities and beliefs surrounding it can teach us much about the ideals and cultures of the living. While biologically death is an end to physical life, this break is not quite so apparent in its mental and spiritual aspects. Indeed, the influence of the dead over the living is sometimes much greater than before death. This volume takes a multidisciplinary approach in an effort to provide a fuller understanding of both historic and contemporary practices linked with death in Korea.
Contributors from Korea and the West incorporate the approaches of archaeology, history, literature, religion, and anthropology in addressing a number of topics organized around issues of the body, disposal of remains, ancestor worship and rites, and the afterlife. The first two chapters explore the ways in which bodies of the dying and the dead were dealt with from the Greater Silla Kingdom (668–935) to the mid-twentieth century. Grave construction and goods, cemeteries, and memorial monuments in Koryŏ (918–1392) and the twentieth century are then discussed, followed by a consideration of ancestral rites and worship, which have formed an inseparable part of Korean mortuary customs since premodern times. Chapters address the need to appease the dead both in shamanic and Confucian contexts. The final section of the book examines the treatment of the dead and how the state of death has been perceived. Ghost stories provide important insight into how death was interpreted by common people in Koryŏ and Chosŏn (1392–1910) while nonconformist narratives of death such as the seventeenth-century romantic novel Kuunmong point to a clear conflict between Buddhist thought and practice and official Neo-Confucian doctrine. Keeping with unendorsed views on death, the final chapter explores how death and the afterlife were understood by early Korean Catholics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea fills a significant gap in studies on Korean society and culture as well as on East Asian mortuary practices. By approaching its topic from a variety of disciplines and extending its historical reach to cover both premodern and modern Korea, it is an important resource for scholars and students in a variety of fields.
Charlotte Horlyck is lecturer in Korean art history in the Department of the History of Art and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Michael J. Pettid is professor of premodern Korean studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University (SUNY), where he also is director of the Translation Research and Instruction Program.
Edited by Kyung-Ae Park
248 pages; 15 charts
The concept of security has undergone significant change in the past few decades. Traditionally thought of in terms of the state-centric, militarily focused, realist discourse, the concept of security has been broadened to include a greater number of potential threats and an increased number of relevant actors. Yet, despite the great changes in security scholarship, the vast majority of studies on North Korea continue to focus primarily on the country's nuclear weapons program, its military, and other traditional security issues surrounding Pyongyang. While North Korea captures headlines with its aggressive behavior and growing nuclear arsenal, the ground-level threats to average, everyday North Koreans go largely unnoticed. This groundbreaking volume seeks to refocus research on North Korean security from the traditional to largely unexplored non-traditional security (NTS) issues.
In the wake of political succession to Kim Jung Un, the issue of non-traditional security is increasingly important. From the lasting effects of the famine of the 1990s to continued food shortages and the growing marketization of North Korean society, the Pyongyang regime is facing diverse and unprecedented challenges. This book offers cutting-edge analyses of emerging North Korean NTS issues by the world's leading specialists in the field. It looks at these issues and their effects at the local, regional, and international levels, as well as examining the international community's efforts to promote an NTS approach to North Korea. More specifically, the volume addresses the traditional and non-traditional security paradigms, energy security, gender security, transnational organized crime, the internal and external dimensions of North Korea's food security, the "Responsibility to Protect," refugee issues and international law, and the role of NGOs in promoting NTS in North Korea.
Contributors: Tsuneo Akaha, Peter Hayes, Brendan Howe, W. Randall Ireson, David C. Kang, Shin-wha Lee, Mark Manyin, Kyung-Ae Park, Scott Snyder, Jae-Jung Suh, David von Hippel.
Kyung-Ae Park holds the Korea Foundation Chair at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia.
By Tatiana Gabroussenko
cloth, ISBN 978-0-8248-3396-1, $49.00
An understanding of contemporary North Korea’s literature is virtually impossible without an investigation of its formative period, 1945–1960, which saw a gradual transformation from the initial “Soviet era” to a Korean version of “national Stalinism.” This turbulent epoch established a long-lasting framework for North Korean literature and set up an elaborate system of political control over literary matters, as well as over the people who served in this field.
In 1946 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) leader Kim Il Sung described the country’s writers as “soldiers on the cultural front,” thus clearly defining what the nascent Communist regime expected from its intellectuals. As a result, many literary nonentities were rewarded with fame and success (often only to be relegated once again to obscurity within a few years) while many outstanding luminaries of the past were erased from the pages of official publications or even lost their lives. The Soviet cultural impact brought new tropes, artistic images, and rhetoric, which were quickly absorbed into the North Korean discourse. However, the cultural politics of the DPRK and the USSR revealed profound and irreconcilable disparities that were rooted in the different political conditions and traditions of each country.
Soldiers on the Cultural Front presents the first consistent research on the early history of North Korea’s literature and literary policy in Western scholarship. It traces the introduction and development of Soviet-organized conventions in North Korean literary propaganda and investigates why the “romance with Moscow” was destined to be short lived. It reconstructs the biographies and worldviews of major personalities who shaped North Korean literature and teases these historical figures out of popular scholarly myth and misconception. The book also investigates the specific forms of control over intellectuals and literary matters in North Korea. Considering the unique phenomenon of North Korean literary critique, the author analyzes the political campaigns and purges of 1947–1960 and investigates the role of North Korean critics as “political executioners” in these events. She draws on an impressive variety and number of sources—ranging from interviews with Korean and Soviet participants, public and family archives, and memoirs to original literary and critical texts—to present a balanced and eye-opening work that will benefit those interested in not only understanding North Korean literature and society, but also rethinking forms of socialist modernity elsewhere in the world.
Tatiana Gabroussenko is a visiting fellow in the Faculty of Asian Studies at Australia National University.
By Yung-Hee Kim
256 pp.; 10 illus.
paper, ISBN 978-0-8248-3409-8, $24.00 cloth, ISBN 978-0-8248-3395-4, $55.00
Available for the first time in English, the ten short stories by modern Korean women collected here touch in one way or another on issues related to gender and kinship politics. All of the protagonists are women who face personal crises or defining moments in their lives as gender-marked beings in a Confucian, patriarchal Korean society. Their personal dreams and values have been compromised by gender expectations or their own illusions about female existence. They are compelled to ask themselves “Who am I?” “Where am I going?” “What are my choices?” Each story bears colorful and compelling testimony to the life of the heroine. Some of the stories celebrate the central character’s breakaway from the patriarchal order; others expose sexual inequality and highlight the struggle for personal autonomy and dignity. Still others reveal the abrupt awakening to mid-life crises and the seasoned wisdom that comes with accepting the limits of old age.
The stories are arranged in chronological order, from the earliest work by Korea’s first modern woman writer in 1917 to stories that appeared in 1995—approximately one from each decade. Most of the writers presented are recognized literary figures, but some are lesser-known voices. The introduction presents a historical overview of traditions of modern Korean women’s fiction, situating the selected writers and their stories in the larger context of Korean literature. Each story is accompanied by a biographical note on the author and a brief critical analysis. A selected bibliography is provided for further reading and research. Questioning Minds marks a departure from existing translations of Korean literature in terms of its objectives, content, and format. As such it will contribute to the growth of Korean studies, increasing the availability of material for teaching Korean literature in English, and stimulate readership of its writers beyond the confines of the peninsula.
Yung-Hee Kim is professor of Korean literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
By Alexander Vovin
cloth, ISBN 978-0-8248-3278-0, $55.00
The Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) portmanteau language family and the Korean language have long been considered isolates on the fringe of northeast Asia. Although in the last fifty years many specialists in Japonic and Korean historical linguistics have voiced their support for a genetic relationship between the two, this concept has not been endorsed by general historical linguists and no significant attempts have been made to advance beyond the status quo. Alexander Vovin, a longtime advocate of the genetic relationship view, engaged in a reanalysis of the known data in the hope of finding evidence in support of this view. In the process of his work, however, he became convinced that the multiple similarities between Japonic and Korean are the result of several centuries of contact and do not descend from a hypothetical common ancestor. In Koreo-Japonica, Vovin carefully reviews recent advances in the reconstruction of both language families. His detailed analysis of most of the morphological and lexical comparisons offered so far shows that whenever the proposed comparisons are not due to pure chance, they can almost always be explained as borrowings from Korean into a central group of Japanese dialects from roughly between the third and eighth centuries A.D. The remaining group of lexical (but not morphological) comparisons that cannot be explained in this way is, he argues, too small to serve as proof of even a distant genetic relationship.
In this volume, a leading historical linguist presents a significant challenge to a view widely held by Japonic and Korean historical linguistics on the relationship between the two language families and offers material support for the skepticism long espoused by general historical linguists on the matter. His findings will both challenge and illuminate issues of interest to all linguists working with language contact and typology as well as those concerned with the prehistory and early history of East Asia.
Alexander Vovin is professor of East Asian languages at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
Edited by Timothy R. Tangherlini and Sallie Yea
237 pp.; 9 illus.; 7 maps; index
Cloth, ISBN 978-0-8248-3138-7, $58.00
Arranged around a set of provocative themes, the essays in this volume engage in the discussion from various critical perspectives on Korean geography. Part One, “Geographies of the (Colonial) City,” focuses on Seoul during the Japanese colonial occupation from 1910–1945 and the lasting impact of that period on the construction of specific places in Seoul. In Part Two, “Geographies of the (Imagined) Village,” the authors delve into the implications for the conceptions of the village of recent economic and industrial development. In this context, they examine both constructed space, such as the Korean Folk Village, and rural villages that were physically transformed through the processes of rapid modernization. The essays in “Geographies of Religion” (Part Three) reveal how religious sites are historically and environmentally contested as well as the high degree of mobility exhibited by sites themselves. Similarly, places that exist at the margins are powerful loci for the negotiation of identity and aspects of cultural ideology. The final section, “Geographies of the Margin,” focuses on places that exist at the margins of Korean society.
Contributors: Todd A. Henry, Jong-Heon Jin, Laurel Kendall, David J. Nemeth, Robert Oppenheim, Michael J. Pettid, Je-Hun Ryu, Jesook Song, Timothy R. Tangherlini, and Sallie Yea.
Timothy R. Tangherlini is a professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Sallie Yea is a senior research fellow in international development at RMIT University, Melbourne.
By Hahn Moo-Sook
Trans. by Young-Key Kim-Renaud
Paper, ISBN 0-8248-2908-5, $20.00
Cloth, ISBN 0-8248-2888-7, $50.00
Published with support from the Korean Literature Translation Institute
A compelling saga of love, jealously, honor, and greed, And So Flows History (Yŏksanun hŭrŭnda, 1947) depicts the relentless power of exterior forces on the lives of three generations of the illustrious Cho family—from the waning years of the Chosŏn dynasty in the late nineteenth century to the tumultuous postliberation era.Hahn Moo-Sook (1918–1993) is one of Korea's most celebrated writers of modern realist literature. She received many awards for her writing, including the 1986 Grand Prix of the Republic of Korea Literature Award for her novel Encounter. And So Flows History, Hahn's first novel, received first prize in a 1947 contest organized by a major Korean daily. "[This] is the first modern Korean novel that defines, both in duration of its action and the issues it addresses, the trajectory of recent Korean history.... [Hahn Moo-Sook] devises a form, which can be characterized as a novel of ideas, in which each character is a symbolic figure, and which interweaves the lives of the Cho family with the social forces of the time. Enormously influential, it prefigures such themes as tradition versus modernization, the repositioning of gender, the redefinition and recomposition of class, the interaction between Koreas in Korea, and those in the diaspora that are taken up in later works." —from the Introduction by JaHyun Kim Haboush
Young-Key Kim-Renaud is the eldest daughter of Hahn Moo-Sook. She is chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and professor of Korean language and culture and international affairs at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
By Andrei N. Lankov
296 pp., cloth, ISBN 0-8248-2809-7
North Korea remains the most mysterious of all Communist countries. The acute shortage of available sources has made it a difficult subject of scholarship. Through his access to Soviet archival material made available only a decade ago, contemporary North Korean press accounts, and personal interviews, Andrei Lankov presents for the first time a detailed look at one of the turning points in North Korean history: the country's unsuccessful attempts to de-Stalinize in the mid-1950s. He demonstrates that, contrary to common perception, North Korea was not a realm of undisturbed Stalinism; Kim Il Sung had to deal with a reformist opposition that was weak but present nevertheless. Lankov traces the impact of Soviet reforms on North Korea, placing them in the context of contemporaneous political crises in Poland and Hungary. He documents the dissent among various social groups (intellectuals, students, party cadres) and their attempts to oust Kim in the unsuccessful "August plot" of 1956. His reconstruction of the Peng-Mikoyan visit of that year—the most dramatic Sino-Soviet intervention into Pyongyang politics—shows how it helped bring an end to purges of the opposition. The purges, however, resumed in less than a year as Kim skillfully began to distance himself from both Moscow and Beijing. The final chapters of this fascinating and revealing study deal with events of the late 1950s that eventually led to Kim's version of "national Stalinism." Lankov unearths data that, for the first time, allows us to estimate the scale and character of North Korea's Great Purge.
Meticulously researched and cogently argued, Crisis in North Korea is a must-read for students and scholars of Korea and anyone interested in political leadership and personality cults, regime transition, and communist politics.
Andrei N. Lankov is a lecturer in the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University.
By Chan E. Park
ISBN 0-8248-2511-X, $44.00 cloth
From its humble "straw mat" origins to its paradoxical status as a national treasure, p'ansori has survived centuries of change and remains the primary source of Korean narrative and poetic consciousness. In this innovative work, Chan Park celebrates her subject not as a static phenomenon but a living, organic tradition adapting to an ever-shifting context. Drawing on her extensive literary and performance backgrounds, Park provides insights into the relationship between language and music, singing and speaking, and traditional and modern reception. Her "performance-centered" approach to p'ansori informs the discussion of a wide range of topics, including the amalgamation of the dramatic, the narrative, and the poetic; the invocation of traditional narrative in contemporary politics; the vocal construction of gender; and the politics of preservation.
Chan E. Park is associate professor of Korean language, literature, and performance folklore at Ohio State University.
By Michael J. Seth
2002. 328 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-2534-9, $49.00 cloth.
In the half century after 1945, South Korea went from an impoverished, largely rural nation ruled by a succession of authoritarian regimes to a prosperous, democratic industrial society. No less impressive was the country's transformation from a nation where a majority of the population had no formal education to one with some of the world's highest rates of literacy, high school graduates, and university students. Drawing on their premodern and colonial heritages as well as American education concepts, South Koreans have been largely successful in creating a schooling system that is comprehensive, uniform in standards, and universal. The key to understanding this educational transformation is South Korean society's striking, nearly universal preoccupation with schooling—what Koreans themselves call their "education fever."
This volume explains how Koreans' concern for achieving as much formal education as possible appeared immediately before 1945 and quickly embraced every sector of society. Through interviews with teachers, officials, parents, and students and an examination of a wide range of written materials in both Korean and English, Michael Seth explores the reasons for this social demand for education and how it has shaped nearly every aspect of South Korean society. He also looks at the many problems of the Korean educational system: the focus on entrance examinations, which has tended to reduce education to test preparation; the overheated competition to enter prestigious schools; the enormous financial burden placed on families for costly private tutoring; the inflexibility created by an emphasis on uniformity of standards; and the misuse of education by successive governments for political purposes.
Michael J. Seth is assistant professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
By Michael Finch
2002. 256 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-2520-9, $45.00 cloth
The diplomat and scholar-official Min Yong-hwan (1861–1905), described by one contemporary Western observer as "undoubtably the first Korean after the emperor," is best remembered in Korean historiography for his pioneering diplomacy at the courts of Tsar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria in the late 1890s. Furthermore, he is considered to be the foremost patriot of Korea's Taehan era (1897–1907). This pioneering study of Min Yong-hwan provides us with a new perspective on a period of Korean history that still casts its shadow over the region today.
This new biography of Min contributes substantially to our understanding of this period by looking beyond the established view of Korea as being polarized between reformists and reactionaries in the late Chosŏn era. In doing so, it provides us with deeper insight into the full range of responses of the late Chosŏn leadership to the dual challenges of internal stagnation and external intervention at the juncture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the recent history of Korea, late nineteenth-century imperialism, and Russian, Japanese, American, and British foreign policy in northeast Asia.
Michael Finch is visiting assistant professor of Korean studies at Keimyung University in Taegu.
By Linda S. Lewis
2002. 208 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-2479-2, $50.00 cloth.
ISBN 0-9248-2543-9, $19.95 paper.
The Kwangju Uprising is one of the most important political events in late twentieth-century Korean history. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the imposition of military rule in the southwestern city of Kwangju in May 1980 turned into a bloody people's revolt. In the two decades since, memories of the Kwangju Uprising have lived on, assuming symbolic importance in the Korean democracy movement, underlying the rise in anti-American sentiment in South Korea, and shaping the nation's transition to a civil society. Nonetheless it remains a contested event, the subject still of controversy, confusion, international debate, and competing claims. As one of the few Western eyewitnesses to the Uprising, Linda Lewis is uniquely positioned to write about the event. In this innovative work on commemoration politics, social representation, and memory, Lewis draws on her fieldwork notes from May 1980, writings from the 1980s, and ethnographic research she conducted in the late 1990s on the memorialization of Kwangju and its relationship to changes in the national political culture. Throughout, the chronological organization of the text is crisscrossed with commentary that provocatively disrupts the narrative flow and engages the reader in the reflexive process of remembering Kwangju over two decades. Highly original in its method and approach, Laying Claim to the Memory of May situates this seminal event in a broad historical and scholarly context. The result is not only the definitive history of the Kwangju Uprising, but also a sweeping overview of Korean studies over the last few decades.
Linda S. Lewis is associate professor of anthropology and director of the East Asian Studies Program at Wittenberg University.
By Wayne Patterson
2000. 284 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-2093-2, $49.00 cloth.
ISBN 0-8248-2241-2, $24.95 paper.
"A clear, persuasive account." —Choice, September 2000
"An insightful and well-researched analysis" —Acta Koreana, 2000
"Patterson provides us with a candid and thorough snapshot of a single generation of Korean immigrants in Hawai`i, each chapter . . . systematically exploring a single aspect of their lives. . . . He underestimates the potential contribution of his research to both Asian and Asian American studies." —Journal of Asian Studies, November 2000
"The Ilse is the most comprehensive work published to date on the initial wave of Korean immigrants to the United States. A well executed qualitative analysis of the life history of the community, the book is also extremely eloquent and entertaining to read. . . . It should be required reading for anyone interested in the history of East Asian immigration in America." —Eui Young Yu, California State University, Los Angeles
On January 13, 1903, the first Korean immigrants arrived in Hawai'i. Numbering a little more than a hundred individuals, this group represented the initial wave of organized Korean immigration to Hawai'i. Over the next two and a half years, nearly 7,500 Koreans would make the long journey eastward across the Pacific. Most were single men contracted to augment (and, in many cases, to offset) the large numbers of existing Chinese and Japanese plantation workers. Although much has been written about early Chinese and Japanese laborers in Hawai'i, until now no comprehensive work had been published on first-generation Korean immigrants, the ilse. Making extensive use of primary source material from Korea, Japan, the continental U.S., and Hawai'i, Wayne Patterson weaves a compelling social history of the Korean experience in Hawai'i from 1903 to 1973 as seen primarily through the eyes of the ilse. Japanese surveillance records, student journals, and U.S. intelligence reports—many of which were uncovered by the author—provide an "inner history" of the Korean community. Chapter topics include plantation labor, Christian mission work, the move from the plantation to the city, picture prides, relations with the Japanese government, interaction with other ethnic groups, intergenerational conflict, the World War II experience, and the postwar years. The Ilse is an impressive and much-needed contribution to Korean American and Hawai'i history and significantly advances our knowledge of the East Asian immigrant experience in the United States.
Wayne Patterson is professor of history at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and author of The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896-1910 (University of Hawai'i Press, 1988).
Translated by Peter H. Lee
2000. 240 pp.
ISBN 89-7155-050-3, $27.00 cloth.
The Imjin nok, or Record of the Black Dragon Year, is the first popular tale inspired by the Japanese invasion of Korea between 1592 and 1598. As a collection of folk narratives clustered around major events and characters, it exists in some forty manuscript and printed versions, long and short, in the vernacular and literary Chinese. Peter H. Lee provides the first accurate and readable translation of this cultural text in English. In the Introduction, Lee traces the rise of popular storytelling in late Choson times, analyzes ten recurrent motifs shared by the most extant versions in the vernacular, and firsthand eyewitness accounts of Korean captives in Japan along with similar accounts of the war in the records of dream journeys and kasa poetry.
Peter H. Lee is professor of Korean and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles
By Miho Choo and William O’Grady
ISBN 0-8248-1738-9, $46.00 cloth.
ISBN 0-8248-1815-6, $26.95 paper.
This first-ever “root dictionary” of Korean designed for second-language learners contains more than 1,500 lists of words built from shared roots. The lists offer a unique and efficient way for learners to acquire new words. On encountering a word, one can consult the lists for its component roots and discover many other semantically related words built from the same elements. The Handbook consists of two sections, one presenting roots of Chinese origin and the second containing native Korean roots. Within each section, each list begins with the relevant root written in Korean script together with the Chinese character (if there is one) and its English translation. The entries for individual words within a list include information about each item’s colloquial interpretation, the literal meaning of the component parts, and the Chinese characters used to write it. The Handbook will be of value to teachers and students of Korean as well as to native speakers of Korean who wish to use the word structure of their native language as a starting point for the study of English vocabulary.
William O'Grady is professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
By Kajiyama Toshiyuki
Translated by Yoshiko Dykstra
Introduction by George Akita and Yong-ho Ch’oe
1995. 186 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-1532-7, $18.00 cloth.
The five stories in this collection are the first English translations of Japanese works dealing with Korea under Japan’s harsh military rule. The stories included in the volume are: “The Clan Records,” “The Remembered Shadow of the Yi Dynasty,” “Seeking Life amdist Death: The Last Day of the War,” “When the Hibiscus Bloom,” and “A Crane on a Dunghill in Seoul in 1936.” “[The stories] are fascinating, sensual, and informative, shedding light on the thought and behavior of colonizers and the colonized in occupied Seoul.” —Journal of Asian Studies
Edited by Kenneth M. Wells
ISBN 0-8248-1700-1, $35.00 cloth.
The minjung (people’s) movement stood in the forefront of the nationwide tide that swept away the military in June 1987 and opened up space for more democratic politics, more responsible economics, and new directions in culture. Yet, as concrete reforms take shape, serious debate has arisen over the identity of the minjung and the values the term represents. This is the first work in English to grapple specifically with the nature, impact, and implications of the diverse forms taken by this national development that lies at the center of the last three decades of tumult and change in South Korea. It offers insights from the per-spective of Korean and Western experts in a variety of disciplines, including leaders of the movement itself.
Translated by Peter H. Lee
1991. 197 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-1298-0, $24.00 cloth.
Taken from the pen names Chong Ch’ol and Yun Sondo, respectively, Pine River and Lone Peak represents the works of the sixtenth- and seventeenth-century Korean masters of the short lyric poetry (sijo) and narrative verse (kasa) forms. This new translation also includes the works of Pak Illo, as well as a literary and cultural introduction to the period, enabling the modern reader to understand the continuous dialogue with the tradition in which these poets engaged.
Peter H. Lee is professor of Korean and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.
By Jong-suk Chay
1990. 239 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-1236-0, $32.00 cloth.
This book contains a wealth of information on early Korean-American relations and offers valuable insights—especially into the role of public opinion in the foreign policy-making process and the influence of systemic change on diplomatic relations.
By Wayne Patterson
1988. 274 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-1090-2, $30.00 cloth.
ISBN 0-8248-1650-1, $19.95 paper.
“With remarkable attention to detail, Patterson not only explains how and why Koreans came to Hawai‘i and their fate on arrival, but also the major political, economic, and diplomatic intrigues involved [in Seoul, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and Hawai‘i’s sugar industry].” —History
Wayne Patterson is professor of history at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.
By James Irving Matray
1985. 351 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-0973-4, $30.00.
“Matray‘s monograph . . . is now the best treatment of the subject. . . . [He] addresses a host of issues that have divided scholars for a decade.”—Reviews in American History
James I. Matray is professor of history at California State University, Chico.
Edited by Youngnok Koo and Dae-Sook Suh
1984. 397 pp.
ISBN 0-8248-0945-9, $30.00.
The century-long relationship between Korea and the United States is examined in this integrated series of studies by Korean and American scholars. The volume grew out of a conference held at the University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Korean Studies in May 1982 in observance of the centennial of the signing of the treaty establishing relations between the two nations. Not limited to an analysis of the political and economic dimensions of the relationship, this book considers as well the historical, cultural, social, and intellectual ties between Korea and the United States.
Edited by Dae-Sook Suh
ISBN 0-8248-1598-X, $35.00 cloth.
This volume contains sixteen papers selected from the nearly one hundred presented at the First Pacific Basin Conference on Korean studies, held in Honolulu in 1992. The papers reflect the wide range of academic disciplines and geographic regions represented at the conference. They are grouped into five broad categories—history, literature, philosophy and religion, politics and economics, and sociology—and address such topics as rethinking popular culture in 1930s Korea, women’s literature in the Chosŏn period, early Western studies of Korean religions, North Korean foreign policy, and ethnic identity and community involvement of young Korean Americans.
Titles in the Hawai'i Studies on Korea series and those listed under "Other Books" may be ordered from the University of Hawai'i Press, Order Dept., 2840 Kolowalu St., Honolulu, HI 96822-1888. Tel. (800) 956-2840 or (808) 956-8255; fax (800) 650-7811 or (808) 988-6052.
The Center for Korean Studies welcomes inquiries and proposals regarding publication in the Hawai'i Studies on Korea series. For further information on the series, click here.


The Past Simple tense is more useful than the Present Simple and Present Continuous tenses, and it is often argued that it should actually be presented earlier than those two. It can also be seen as a great opportunity to teach loads of useful verbs and time expressions like “two years ago”, “once upon a time, a long long time ago” and “the day before yesterday”.
What students will need to know about the Past Simple tense includes:
- Irregular forms
- Pronunciation of regular and irregular forms
- Spelling of regular forms
- When it should be used, mainly meaning time clauses that it can be used with
- Use of the auxiliary “did” in question formation, negatives and short answers
Student problems with the Past Simple tense tend to include:
- Using the Present Simple instead
- Using the Past Perfect tense instead, especially when the action happened a long time ago
- Using the Present Perfect instead of the Past Simple, especially for speakers of languages such as French who have a tense with a similar structure that is used in more or less the same way as the Past Simple in English
- Pronouncing all –ed endings as /ed/, also meaning adding syllables to many verbs that should remain the same length as the Present Simple/ infinitive
- Confusing “before” with “ago” in sentences like “I came here 20 years before” (which would mean twenty years before the previous event I talked about rather than 20 years before now)
- Confusion between particular pairs of past forms, e.g. “felt”/ “fell” and “found”/ “founded”
- Confusion caused by irregular forms with similar spelling and different pronunciation
- Not knowing the meanings of the verbs they are expected to learn the past forms of
- Wasting time, effort and mental capacity on things which are not important such as rarely used verbs which are irregular or differences between British and American English
- Mixing up prepositions in Past Simple time expressions with sentences like “I did it on yesterday” and “I got up in ten o’clock”
Teaching Past Simple pronunciation and spelling rules
The general rule with regular forms is that –ed has a /t/ sound when it follows an unvoiced sound, as after /p/ in “stopped” and after /s/ in “passed”. By contrast, voiced sounds like /b/ in “robbed” and /z/ in “phased out” are followed by a /d/ sound. This is quite easy to explain, as the difference between the final /t/ and the final /d/ sound is also that the former is unvoiced and the latter is voiced. This means that unvoiced sounds are followed by the unvoiced /t/ sound and voiced sounds are followed by the voiced /d/ sound, obviously saving you “switching” your vocal cords on and off. Students can almost always work this out for themselves with some help.
Once students have understood the straightforward rule above, I generally wouldn’t spend any more time on the distinction between /d/ and /t/ pronunciations of –ed. For one thing, students will often reproduce this effect naturally as their fluency improves anyway, as it is easier to speak that way. In addition, this distinction very rarely causes comprehension problems. More important than the distinction between /t/ and/d/ is the fact that neither form increases the number of syllables in the word. This is because in English the number of syllables is the same as the number of vowel sounds and there is no extra vowel sound in /d/ and /t/, leading to one syllable in both “wash” and “washed” and two syllables in both “increase” and “increased”.
In contrast to those two pronunciations, after infinitives ending with /t/ (as in “pasted”) and /d/ (as in “needed”) –ed in pronounced /id/, and this does increase the number of syllables. This is also fairly easy to understand or help students work out for themselves, as it is impossible to pronounce /tt/ in English without an intervening vowel sound.
All this means a fairly large distinction between /id/ with its added syllable and /d/ and /t/ without. This is often worth a bit of classroom time, especially with students who add another syllable to all regular past forms. The teaching ideas further down this article can be used with whatever distinction you decide to focus on, or even all three at the same time if for some reason you decide on that.
Many textbooks deal with the presentation stage by asking students to listen for the pronunciations of the –ed endings in order to classify and then (often) think about why that might be. I believe the first stage of that is either useless or impossible for students most of the time, because if they can hear the difference they can probably produce it sooner or later without the need to study it! It is therefore usually better to give them the pronunciations of some verbs with –ed endings to think about the reasons for, then they can put other verbs into the same categories by a combination of analysing the last sounds and listening to the pronunciation. Starting with a stage where they listen for the pronunciation can work with /id/ pronunciations, however, especially if you ask them to count syllables rather than think about sounds.
The other issue with regular forms is spelling. For example, in the verbs above “stopped” has a doubled consonant before the –ed ending, but “needed” is not “needded”. The simple rule is that short stressed vowel sounds followed by a single consonant need the consonant doubled. This is part of the Magic E spelling rule.
The Magic E rule tells us that a short vowel sound followed by a single consonant and the letter E “says its name”. This can be seen in the pairs fat/ fate, gen/ gene, bit/ bite, dot/ dote and cut/ cute, in which the vowel sounds in the second in each pair is the same as the letters of the alphabet A, E, I, O and U. The same thing would not happen with words with long vowel sounds (including diphthongs) and words with more than one final consonant. For example, in the imaginary pairs batt/ batte, bitt/ bitte etc all the words would be pronounced the same way, and the same would be true of deign/ deigne etc. Magic E is probably the most well-known spelling rule amongst native speakers and the most useful for language learners to study. Less well known is that exactly the same rule is true with words ending in –ing and –ed, leading to the spelling rule for –ed endings explained above.
How to teach irregular Past Simple forms
As with regular forms, the greatest problems with irregular forms like “went” and “bought” tend to be pronunciation and then spelling. As the vast majority of students will take regular –ed endings to be the default mode, students will also need to remember which verbs are irregular, and many students also seem to have a mental subcategory for “verbs which don’t change” such as “put” and “cut”.
The good news about irregular Past Simple forms is that almost all of them are close enough to their infinitive forms that even students who have never seen them before can usually match them up, and this is even easier if the verbs are in context. With classes who have confidence (in themselves and the teacher), it is even possible to start with a game in which they do so, such as the Pelmanism game mentioned in the practice section below.
It is probably even easier for students to guess which of a pair of words in the past and which is the present, again especially if the words are given in at least a sentence of context (something that could be used to present time expressions as well). This means that this could also be done as a game stage before the presentation, in this case with games such as Stations.
How to teach time expressions with Past Simple
It isn’t usually worth actually presenting time clauses with Past Simple until you have Present Perfect to contrast it with, so instead I usually just give them suggested phrases like “two years ago” and “the week before last” in whatever speaking games we are using (see below). Another approach is to do a lesson on prepositions of time like “at 7 o’clock” and “on Monday” but no preposition with “yesterday” and “last year”. Students could be asked to spot the similarities between time expressions with the same preposition (e.g. “on Xmas day”, “on 25 December” and “on Monday” are the same because they are actually the same day) and then classify others in the same way, or this could be combined with past verbs forms in an error correction activity with sentences like “I go there yesterday” and “I went there in last year”.
How to teach Past Simple question formation and negatives
Past Simple questions are easier both than Past Simple positive statements (because the verbs are in the infinitive) and than the Present Simple questions that have probably been presented earlier (because there is no third person S). There is therefore probably no need for specific presentation of this point. The same is true of negatives and short answers. However, this might be a good point to show how “What do you do?” and “What did you do?” are part of the general pattern of “(Wh) + auxiliary verb + S + main verb” that will also be useful later on.
Classroom activities for regular Past Simple pronunciation and spelling
The most active way of practising this point is getting students to physically react depending on which form they think they hear (preferably being able to analyse them using the rules which have been presented to double check). This only really works with a double distinction (rather than trying to do all three pronunciations of –ed at the same time). Young learner classes can be asked to run and touch opposite walls of the room with “/id/” and “/d/ or /t/” written on them (in a game called Stations) or race to slap one of two cards on their desk. The same thing could also be done with “one syllable” and “two syllables” to emphasize that part of the pronunciation. Adults can do something similar by lifting cards with the –ed pronunciation or number of syllables written on them. There is also a great worksheet called Pronunciation Journey in the book Pronunciation Games which can be adapted for this point in which students take the right or left branch on a kind of tree diagram depending on which sound they think is there and after six or so stages shout out where they have ended up.
It is also possible to play the card games Snap and Pelmanism with this pronunciation point, with students competing to be the first to shout out “Snap” whenever two cards which have the same –ed pronunciation come up or students trying to find two words that have the same –ed pron. These games can also be used to make distinctions between all three pronunciations, if you want to go into that much detail. As a preliminary or ending stage, students can also be asked to classify the whole pack of cards by putting them into columns, and the same cards could also be used for storytelling by asking them to place the cards in order as they use as many of them as they can to tell a story starting with a sentence like “Yesterday, John woke up in a field.” This game can also be used for irregular forms or a mix of both.
A quieter but possibly more intellectually stimulating activity is an –ed pronunciation maze. Make a ten by ten table with one pronunciation of –ed tracing a route from the top left corner to the bottom right one. Fill all the other squares with other pronunciations of –ed. Students must draw the route on the map by working out which pronunciation the first square has and finding a string of ones which are the same.
Classroom activities for irregular Past Simple pronunciation and spelling
My favourite activity for this point is to get students to put past forms together by their vowel sound, e.g. putting “brought” and “fought” into one column, preferably with cut up pieces of paper. With more confident classes this can be done straight from the infinitive forms. If you have enough examples of most vowel sounds (only usually possible by eliminating some of them or including some slightly obscure verbs), it is also possible to play Snap or Pelmanism with the match being by vowel sound.
A much simpler game, especially for young learners, is Past Simple Tennis/ Volleyball/ Badminton/ Squash. Students “serve” an infinitive to their partner and their partner must reply with the Past Simple. This can be played with the real rules of the game you chose, especially when it comes to who serves, or can be simplified.
Classroom activities for Simple Past time expressions
The classroom game which is most clearly focussed on this point is Guess the Time. Students choose or are given a time like “5000 years ago” or “last Sunday” and have to describe things that happened then until someone guesses the correct time.
They could also be asked to find something that they both did at a certain past time like “This morning” and “Before dinner last night” (although this is easier with Past Continuous). A game where they have to find things that they first did before their partner or did more recently than their partner also brings up this kind of form a lot in exchanges like “I last had coffee an hour ago” “I had one just outside the classroom door about five minutes ago, so I win”.
There is also a suitable bluffing game for this in one of the Communication Games books called When Did You Last See Your Father. Students must answer a “When did you last…?” question with one of the given time clauses, and after answering other questions about that event their partners can accuse them of lying in their original answer (because actually the most recent time of that thing was different or because they have never done that thing).
Classroom activities for Past Simple questions, negatives and short answers
The simplest and nicest game for this is Make Me Say Yes I Did, in which students get one point if they get that response from their partner but no points if they say “No, I didn’t”. That can then be reversed with them getting one point for negative responses to questions like “Did you ride on an elephant yesterday?” and “Did you fall asleep in this class last week?”
A similar but more complex game is them having to say “Yes, I did” to all questions even if that isn’t true. After three Wh questions, their partner guesses whether the original “Yes, I did” was true or not. This is also similar to When Did You Last See Your Father above.
A bit more imagination is also needed for the variation Make Me Say I Don’t Remember, with questions like “What did you eat for breakfast three days ago?” and “What colour was your last toothbrush?” getting one point if “I don’t remember” is the (true) response. This can also be turned into a bluffing game by getting them to give the real answer whenever they do remember and an imaginary answer whenever they don’t remember the real one. After three Wh questions, their partner guesses which the answer was.
The games above are very likely to throw up questions like “Did you clean your teeth this morning?” that are unlikely to be much use in real life. This can be exploited by giving them some good and bad examples of Past Simple conversational questions to rank from five points for completely taboo to one point for nice easy conversation starters. They then ask each other questions and get points depending on how difficult the question was and how well they answered, perhaps including the possibility of choosing more difficult questions so that they can get more points.
It is possible to play the Alibi Game (or variations such as Spies) with just Past Simple, but I prefer to leave it until they know at least Past Continuous as well.
Classroom activities for a mix of regular and irregular Simple Past
Games mentioned above which can be used with both regular and irregular forms include Snap, Pelmanism, Tennis, and Stations (and its sit down versions), e.g. by shouting “Snap” if two words are both regular or running and touching walls with “Regular” and “Irregular” written on them. The games below can also be used with just one kind of verb but work better with a mix.
Storytelling also works really well with a mix of both regular and irregular verbs, perhaps after doing it with just one of the categories of verb first. The best way of doing this is to give students cut up cards with one infinitive on each, and ask them to work together to continue a story starter such as “Steven found when he woke up that he had two heads”. This can be made competitive by giving a point for each verb used.
Students can also work with individual verbs, this time trying to make true statements about their partner with them to get a point and be able to cross them off the list or discard a card from their hand.
For even nicer classroom dynamics, you could also ask them to find things in common with the verbs you give them, e.g. “We both had a bath twice yesterday”.
It is also possible to use videos to practise this point, for example by giving students a list of infinitives of verbs and asking them to shout out or write down sentences using as many of those verbs as they can as they watch the film, e.g. “The cat grew really big”.
Classroom activities for a mix of pronunciations
An activity that can be used for any of the pronunciations above (e.g. /t/ endings and different vowels in irregular verbs) is asking them brainstorm as many examples of one category as they can, perhaps as a race. This works best when you have at least five categories you can ask them to brainstorm.
Another nice thing that you need a fair amount of language to make possible is looking at homophones and minimal pairs in past forms, e.g. “past”/ “passed” and “saw”/ “sew”.
Freer speaking that should bring up the Past Simple tense
The most obvious kind of speaking that brings up loads of Past Simple sentences is anecdotes such as “A memorable day at school” or “My favourite teacher at primary school”. As well as giving them a list of suitable topics, you can give the person who is listening a list of things to listen out for or ask questions about when their partner finishes such as “location” and “season”.
You could also give them phrases to react with when their partner is telling their anecdote, e.g. “Poor you” and “That was lucky”. This can be turned into a game by giving them phrases that they should try to get from their partner with (true or made up) past statements like “I lost my keys yesterday”.
You can also set up roleplay conversations, e.g. asking them to “boast” in pairs about what a terrible year they had last year. This also works well with roleplay interviews, which naturally tend to be at least half about the past.
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