English grammar - Future perfect

Resource centre - English grammar - Future perfect

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Form

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.

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Meaning

1. We use future perfect when an action will be complete at a specific time in the future.
   • I will have finished my project by the weekend.
   • This time next year I will have graduated college.
2. We use future perfect to predict the present.
   • Don't bother going to see him, he'll have left.

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Teaching ideas for future perfect

How do you teach future perfect? Add your idea »

Candice

  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!

Lorena

  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.

Sara

  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.

Des

  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.

Richard

  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.

Tiny TEFL Teacher

  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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