These days, I’m faced with the unenviable, unpalatable task of getting students to remember the past tense form of irregular verbs.
Given that some of them have poor working memory, I don’t think it will be easy to give them to remember all these:
Guided by the desire to understand the enormity of my task, I actually asked Gemini (used to be Bard) the number of irregular verbs that are in existence. It replied me 200. Which means that I got to coach my students to remember 200 words that may be unfamiliar to them.
What an undertaking! I decided to simplify matters. I recalled that mastering the words from the Dolch List would enable students to read 50-75% of children’s books. I thus decided to extract the irregular verbs that are found on this list:
But my task was not done yet. I merely extracted the high frequency verbs that my students would encounter often, but I have not given them cognitive handles to make sense of the information.
So I went one step further and sorted out these irregular verbs into one of the following five categories:
That way, I can confidently tell them that they need to remember 33 irregular past tense verbs by the end of the school year. Giving them a concrete number for them to work towards makes for a powerful statement.
It’s like giving my students a mental chest of drawers so that they know the most suitable drawer to mentally insert the relevant irregular verbs. In other words, this helps to create categories which can help make sense of material to be learned.
Teaching Considerations
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Note that this list doesn’t include irregular verbs frequently used in students’ everyday life, such as bought and taught because they are not in the Dolch list.
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Would it help to reduce our students’ cognitive load if we get students to remember the American spelling of these irregular verbs instead: burned, leaned, leaped, learned, dreamed, spilled, smelled, spelled, spoiled?
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Perhaps, we could systematise our instruction such that Year 1 and Year 2 students focus on regular and irregular verbs respectively? So, for their Mid-Year Exam, Year 1 students could be asked to fill in the blanks for past tense irregular verbs like walked, planned (double the consonant) and studied (change -y to -ied).