While teaching the present progressive tense to my Thai M6 students (equivalent to seniors in the the US), I decided to try another approach to the boring rote of teaching presenting present partciple spelling rules.

I barely learned these rules myself. I knew my students wouldn't even try.

So......I thought about it a while and applied an old computer-programming technique I once used back in my days in college. That technique is flowcharting. I gave it a try and it did make it easier to present the rules. It did seem to help SOME of my students learn the rules as well.

Here's a sample, in numbered form, of the first
step(s) I used:

1. ALWAYS BEGIN HERE
2. Does the dictionary verb form end in

-w, -x, or -y?

Yes------> Simply add -ing to the end of the verb.

No-------> and so on......

You have to remember I used an actual flowchart. Yes, I used a page with ovals, rectangles, lines, arrowheads, just like in a computer-programming environment. I would try to represent it here using this text editor, but I'm afraid it wouldn't display correctly when posted.

You get the idea though?

I used a flowcharting shareware program I downloaded from Netscape. It produced beautiful flowcharts that were easy to produce and read.

Good luck in teaching.

E