When we’ve spoken a language for a long time, it becomes harder to hear our mistakes. Think about how you speak English. Do you speak with perfect grammar? Do you even know what the term “past perfect tense” means for English? Probably not. However, if you were to walk into an English class meant to work on your writing skills and your grammar, you would expect to try to follow the grammar rules. It’s the same way with this class. Simply relying on what you’ve always said, instead of taking the time to focus on whether what you’re saying is correct or not, won’t help you be successful in this course.

The following practice gives you a sentence and asks you to identify basic parts of speech (subject, verb, object, etc.) and tense being used (present, preterit, etc.) This will help you start to notice the different words in the sentences and think about how they are being used.