Word list in developmental order
Functional
ate, bit, blew, broke, built, caught, came, cut, did, drew, drank, fell, flew, found, got, gave, had, let, lost, made, put, read, ran, said, saw, sat, stood, stuck, told, took, threw, went, woke, won, wore, wrote, was
Later Developing
began, brought, became, bought, burnt, chose, dove, drove, dug, felt, fit, fought, forgot, grew, hung, hid, hit, held, hurt, kept, knew, laid, left, met, paid, quit, rode, rang, sank, set, shook, shrank, sang, shot, shut, slept, slid, sold, spoke, spun, stole, stung, struck, swept, swore, swam, swung, tore, taught, thought
Advanced
bent, bled, bred, broadcast, cost, crept, dealt, fit, flung, forgave, froze, heard, led, lit, meant, mistook, overcame, proved, rose, sent, slid, sought, sped, spent, split, understood, upheld, upset, wept, withstood, wrung, stank
Worksheets
Choices Word Search Grid Sentence Drop
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Drills/ Scripts Pictures Functional, Misc. Board Games, etc.
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Bullseye Sentence Drop Sentence Search Sentence Maze
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Background Information
To acquire irregular past tense verbs one must first learn to express things that happened in the past, before then learning the exceptions to the usual –ed ending. Irregular past tense verbs are problematic for young children and foreign language learners. Some basic ones are learned from a very early age. Most children learn to say “I did it,” before understanding that do and did are different versions of the same word. There is some predictability (teach-taught, catch-caught, get-got, forget-forgot), while often the unpredictability makes learning these words nothing short of memorization (take changes to took, while make changes to made). This property of the class of irregular past tense verbs to be both partly memorized and partly derived from predictable rules has caused these words to be key in the debate between evolutionary-psychological and Chomskyan-nativist models of language acquisition (Pinker, 2001).
Research suggests that children with SLI use bare stem forms (e.g. catch for caught) more frequently than younger control children (Rice, Wexler, Marquis, Hershberger, 2000). As has been shown with other language skills (Childers and Tomasello, 2002), research has implied that learning of irregular past tense verbs is facilitated through distributed practice rather than massed practice. Children with specific language impairment do not seem to learn these forms as effectively from adult repetitions of error sentences with the correct form of the verb (Williams and Fey, 2007).
Identification of the incorrect use of an irregular past tense verb helps develop the skill of correctly using these words. Knowing that catched “just sounds wrong” helps eliminate the common error of overgeneralization of the –ed form.
Tests that assess for irregular past tense verbs include the OWLS, the SPELT, the CASL-Syntax Construction, and the PLS.
Goal Suggestions
Edgar will identify incorrect early developing irregular past tense verbs in simple sentences, e.g. “The bear catched a fish.”
Joanne will correctly label later developing irregular past tense verbs, e.g. “What is the past tense of the word ‘shake’?”
Johnny will use the correct form of later developing and curriculum relevant irregular past tense verbs in varied sentences, e.g. “Use the word freeze in a past tense sentence beginning with yesterday.”
Elicitation Ideas
