Earlier than what, twenty times
Round the room. Each person says one had sentence from their story; the next person asks earlier than what? and the first answers in three words.
Twice round. Anybody who cannot answer changes their sentence to the past simple on the spot.
Nine clauses. Match each to the layer it belongs to.
The page is not the telling
On the page
What I did not know until that moment was that the airline had rebooked half the Lisbon passengers onto a later connection that afternoon, while we were all still in the air.
Out loud
And here is the thing I did not find out for another twenty minutes. While we were in the air — while we were actually flying — somebody in Lisbon had gone through the passenger list and moved half of us onto a later connection. Half. And they had done it while we were thirty thousand feet up with no way of knowing.
Three questions comparing the two.
1. The spoken version repeats while we were in the air twice. Why?
2. The spoken version says Half. as a one-word sentence. What does that do?
3. Which version should you give today?
Keeping a timeline audible
Three things speech does that the page does not need
| On the page | Out loud | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The plane had gone forty minutes earlier. | The plane had gone. Forty minutes before I got there. Forty. | A listener needs the gap stated, not implied |
| by the time I reached her I had been queueing for forty minutes | and by this point — this is forty minutes in — I finally get to the desk | Speech marks its own position on the timeline |
| What I did not know until that moment was… | Now. Here is what I did not know. | A short signal beats a long subordinate clause |
Six moves. Put them into the order you will speak in — the written shape with one change at the end.
The unit task, in three parts
Task card · Part one · Hand in · 4 minutes
Your clean rewrite goes into your portfolio today.
A final check against five things, then hand it over.
- About 240 words, count at the bottom.
- It opens at the discovery, not at the beginning.
- Every had has an answer to earlier than what?
- One duration, one line of direct speech, one present-perfect final paragraph.
- Stress marked correctly on every word over three syllables.
Task card · Part two · Speaking · 5 minutes each
A new partner who has not read your piece and will not. Your page stays face down.
Five minutes, in the six moves, without notes.
- Forty seconds of background before the discovery.
- The discovery in one short sentence, then the reach-back from a single anchor.
- At least four past perfects and one had been -ing.
- One line of direct speech, said the way they said it.
- Finish on what you do differently now and what you would still change.
Listener’s job, and it is assessed too. One horizontal line and two columns.
1. Place every event on the line in the order it happened. Question-mark anything you cannot place.
2. Every had clause, and what it was earlier than.
3. Every word over three syllables whose stress landed somewhere unexpected.
React out loud at least ten times. Five minutes of silence is not neutral.
Task card · Part three · The comparison · 5 minutes
You now have a marked written piece with a drawn timeline, and a listener’s line from somebody who never saw it.
One sentence about the gap.
- Count the question marks on the written timeline. Count them on the spoken one.
- They are almost never the same number. Which is higher?
- Which direction do your spoken errors go — leaving the tense out, or putting it where there is no anchor?
- Write one sentence: Under pressure I ___ the past perfect, which loses the reader when ___ .
Closing the unit
Eight errors, one from each lesson. Fix each and name the lesson.
1. When I arrived at the gate, the plane already left.
2. I realised that I had left my bag, and I had run back.
3. Yesterday I had missed my connection.
4. They gave no informaTION and no availaBIliTY.
5. By that point I was queueing for ninety minutes.
6. She told me the agency closed in June.
7. When we got in, the fire had went out.
8. a reFUND — the noun
One final travel paragraph, all three layers. One to four words per gap.
It dark by the time the coach pulled into the station and about half the passengers . The driver said the connecting service twenty minutes earlier, which he at the previous stop and had not mentioned. By that point we for nine hours. A woman near the front up and asked, very calmly, what he us to do now. Nobody anything for about four seconds.
What this unit was about
Four questions covering the whole unit.
1. When do you need the past perfect?
2. What is the test?
3. Where does the stress fall in reservation?
4. A REfund and to reFUND —
The unit in one line. The past perfect is not a deeper past. It is a relative tense: it needs a second point to be earlier than, and its whole job is to keep a timeline straight when the telling stops running in order.
And English stress is not arbitrary. The suffix decides, in five rules, and the noun-verb pair decides the rest.
Next unit. You have told what happened to you. Next you deal with the people it happened through — service desks, complaints, requests — and the modal gradient that separates a firm complaint from a rude one.
Keep the sentence you wrote in part three. Brazilian speakers tend to under-use the hedges that soften a request in English, and the next unit is built around exactly that.