It was an interesting lesson yesterday in a positive way. The students were learning the present perfect simple in the context of single past actions/events (unspecific time). Since all of them are L1- and L2-speakers of Italian, there is no doubt that translation has played a certain role in their acquisition of this grammatical structure in English.
We started off with the topic of continents and countries. The students made a list of A-Z countries, A for Argentina, B for Brazil, C for Canada, and so on. This was an engaging activity for them.
The students were then shown a short dialogue:
Person A: I went to France two years ago.
Person B: Have you been to France?
Person A: Yes, I have.
The language clarification work then centred itself on the difference between a specific past time (past simple) and 'time not known' (present perfect simple).
After that, the students used their list of countries and practised the closed interrogative form along with the short answers.
In the next lesson stage, the students practised doing KEY Reading Part 2 to focus on the affirmative and the negative forms.
It was at this stage that the focus on -ve (pronunciation) and the form took place. This has made me wonder if some coursebook writers suggest a similar approach:
meaning - practice activity (focus on meaning, e.g. alternate responses) - pronunciation work - inferring the form - practice activity (gap-fill)
...
Fast forward to the language practice stages:
15 minutes left - at this point, the students had just finished doing a guess true or false sentence construction activity with a deck of paper cards (verbs). They were all making excellent progress. (Student A's current language level was very strong.)
Student A: Let's play a game.
Me: All right then. What would you like to play?
(various ideas from the class)
Student B: A-Z list of cities this time?
Student C: Simon Says?
Me: Right, let's have a vote. Who would like to play ...?
Then we played Simon Says for 5 minutes. (I joined in the game too.)
...
7 minutes left - the students wrote three questions with 'Have you + verb (past participle) ...?' which they would like to ask each other. We finished the lesson with another practice.
Note: This is a Teens KEY preparation class at Pre-Intermediate (A2) level.