WREN Webinar: COU 502 – Irregular Verb Forms and Forming Present-Perfect Verbs

Mr. LoebEnglish IIKenwood Academy High School2014-2015

Our Goals

• Kenwood Academy 10th grade writers will…1. Achieve 3 points growth between the pre-PLAN

and post-PLAN.2. Achieve 85% mastery on all English and Reading

College Readiness Skills covered in the course.3. Score an average of 85% on all writing

assignments by the end of the year.

• Most verbs in the English language form their past tense by adding the –ed suffix to the end of the verb.

• However, there are some verbs that cannot form their past tense using the –ed suffix. These are called irregular verbs.

• Today, we’re going to learn about how to form these verbs, and, more importantly, how NOT to form them incorrectly.

Overview

• While more verbs get an –ed suffix added to them to form the past tense and past participle forms, there are several verb in the English language that do not follow this pattern.

Regular: walk (walked) open (opened) mail (mailed)

Irregular: fight (fought) build (built) freeze (froze, frozen)

Can you think of any others?

Explanation of Skill

• Present-perfect verbs (verbs that have) do not use the word OF.

Examples:Incorrect: Wendy might of eaten the last piece of pie.Correct: Wendy might have eaten the last piece of pie.

Incorrect: Gary should of taken out the garbage.Correct: Gary should have taken out the garbage.

Explanation of Skill

• DO NOT use the word “OF” with a verb! This is the most common error when forming present-perfect verbs.

• Why is this such a common error?• When writers use contractions with present-

perfect verb forms, they form would’ve, should’ve, and could’ve, etc.

• Yet, over time, if writers are not careful, the sound of those contractions can give way to the sloppy use of the preposition “OF” instead of “have”. Don’t do it!

Explanation of Skill