Resource centre - English grammar - Future perfect
Form
Meaning
Teaching ideas
Add your idea
Future Continuous
Will and Going to
Tense and aspect
Articles
Be used to
Causative Have
Comparatives
Few and Little
First Conditional
Future Continuous
Future Perfect
Get Used To
Have and Have Got
Indirect Questions
Lend and Borrow
Passive
Past Continuous
Past Perfect Continuous
Past Perfect Simple
Past Simple
Present Continuous
Present Perfect Continuous
Present Perfect Simple
Present Simple
Questions
Reflexive Pronouns
Reported Questions
Reported Speech
Reporting Verbs
Say and Tell
Second Conditional
Small and Little
So and Such
Tag Questions
Third Conditional
Too and Enough
Used to
Will and Going to
Wish
Zero Conditional
will have + verb 3 (past participle)
NOTE - There is no future tense in English. Instead we use a variety of forms to talk about the future. Will (in this case with have + verb 3) is one of those forms. In many student grammars (and here!) this form is referred to as future perfect for convenient comparison with similar perfect forms in the present and past. See this post about tense and aspect for more.
How do you teach future perfect? Add your idea ยป
Not an idea as such, but more
of a question. How can you put the future perfect tense into some kind of theme
with an activation that upper intermediates can relate to? I'm really struggling
with this.. help!
It's easy, you can set a date
in the future and ask your students what they plan to have finished by then,
like: "By the year 2010, I will have graduated from university" or "By the year
2015, I will probably have gotten married, etc. It's interesting because it
makes them set goals, like "By the end of next year, I will be speaking English
well.
I am really stuck with this
but I thought of this:
After analysing the form and doing some gap fills. Get the students to build a
story together using questions or prompts. So each student writes a line, folds
over the page and then passes it on and the next student writes the next line.
With this exercise you could slip in a question or prompt to get them to use the
future perfect.
Choose a female student, ask
her to pick the person she would most like to have a date with (anyone at all) -
Explain that next friday at 7pm, the student is going to date Mr X. Explain that
Mr X is very impatient and doesn't like to be kept waiting, so she must be ready
on time.
Elicit from the class all the things the student will have to do next
Friday before the date (buy new dress, go to the salon for hair do, manicure,
leg waxing, clean the house, have a bath etc etc) then ask how long each
activity will take her and write the time by the activity. Then establish with
the class the order of these events. Draw a time line with the activities in
sequence at the top of the board. Elicit what time she will have to start in
order to be ready on time and mark the time line accordingly.
Then explain that next Friday morning her car breaks down or some similar
event and she is (for example) 90 mins. late starting these activities. Now,
re-time the timeline based on the later starting time. From here, ask students
"What will she have done by the time Mr X arrives?", elicit and board the
sentences, then ask "What won't she have finished by this time?".
From here you have an excellent context and the form to teach the target
language and even the quietest classes get fully engaged, especially discussing
what she should do to prepare for the date and how long these things take.
Bring in some funky clothes
such as a headscarf, some decorative pieces of fabric and if you have one, a
crystal ball, the children's balls with Christmas scenes can be a good
substitute. Have students predict what their classmate will have accomplished in
the future. I always get some really enthused students who become very inventive
in their predictions...
"By the time John is 20, he will have planted, fertilized and harvested a crop
of cannabis. Two years later the FBI will have arrested him, put him on trial
and sent him to jail.
I made a crystal ball using
flash. As a warmer, the students type in questions (will I ... / should I ...).
It gives a cryptic or definite answer which the students can then discuss. I've
put it up on the internet, so if you have an Interactive Whiteboard in your
classroom, you can access it here:
www.tinyteflteacher.co.uk/teacher/IT/crystalball.html
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