KS4 · French · Year 11
Je sortais la poubelle quand ... :perfect, imperfect, relative clauses, negation
Lifestyle and wellbeing/ My neighbourhood: La vie quotidienne
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IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/9
Your learning goal
I can talk about past events using the imperfect tense and the perfect tense, relative clauses and negation.
1 of 9
Je sortais la poubelle quand ... :perfect, imperfect, relative clauses, negation: slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I can talk about past events using the imperfect tense and the perfect tense, relative clauses and negation.
Key learning points
- The imperfect tense is used to describe what 'was happening' or what you 'were doing' when something else happened.
- Form the imperfect by removing -ons from 'nous' present tense and adding:-ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient
- Où and quand can be used in relative clauses to detail where or when something was happening.
- For 'neither...nor', ne precedes the verb and each ni precedes one of the negated qualities/nouns.
- Ne ... que means 'only'. 'Que' follows the verb and precedes the noun that is limited.
Words to know
- imperfect tense
- tense used to describe how things were or used to be in the past, or to say what was happening
- relative pronoun
- a pronoun that introduces a relative clause
Common mistakes
The imperfect tense is only used to describe how things were or used to be in the past.
The imperfect tense is also used to say what was happening when another thing occurred where it is used in combination with the perfect tense e.g. il regardait la télé quand son portable a sonné.
For parents, carers and teachers
- During the vocabulary focus in the 1st learning cycle, teachers may want to remind pupils about their personal word repertoire, and encourage them to keep adding any words that are important to them to the place set aside for this.