An Observation about Preterit vs Imperfect

This can be a tough concept for my Spanish II students.  One technique that I try to help students learn how to determine which past tense they should use is to teach them vocabulary words that usually (because there are always exceptions!) indicate one tense or the other.

We learned the words last week and practice them today.  We started this part of class by studying the words for 1 1/2 minutes and then the students tried to remember as many words as possible in under two minutes.  Each student recorded his or her name in a column that matched their score (these columns were in ranges: 0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-13--or something really close to that).  We studied for three minutes and then tried to remember as many clue words as possible in under two minutes again.  Students recorded their new scores under the green line on the board.

We then repeated these steps for the imperfect.

Afterwards I looked at the two sides of the board and noticed that the kids had done significantly better on the imperfect words even in the first round.  I'm not sure of all the reasons for this difference in their knowledge of the vocabulary for the two different tenses but I did realize that they have used some of the imperfect clue words since mid-Spanish I whereas many of the preterit clue words are new this unit.

So my take-away?  Start introducing the preterit clue words earlier in the year when I first introduce the tense.  Then not only have they had the chance to start becoming familiar with those words but they also associate the words with the preterit from experience more than just a given list.

Preterit is on the left side, imperfect on the right after the line dividing my whiteboard in half.  The categories are hard to see (faint marker) but 0-3 started on the left for both groups.  There is a definite skew to the right for the imperfect.