Verbs 'ser', 'estar', 'ficar', 'ter' in context

October 2021

Lecturers
Students

Teacher Education
Tourism

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Portuguese

Portuguese

A2

Activity/task

Vocabulary

Writing
Reading

This resource was made available by a Portuguese professor, and it focuses on vocabulary aspects of the Portuguese language, specifically on the use of words connected with family daily routines in different situations of the spoken and written language. It is a reading worksheet, which provides options to fill in gaps. It is suitable for learners with A1 level in Portuguese (if learning the language as a foreign language) or for students who need to improve their writing/vocabulary skills when it comes to the correct use of different words in different situations. Language in areas Teacher Education, Tourism language accuracy is central. So, this resource could assist the teacher as he/she would provide their students with such exercise, adapting it and creating other more complex examples, depending on the level of the students. The students can also use this resource autonomously and try to understand sentence structure and meaning in order to better fill in the spaces.

The resource was tested with A2 students in a foreign language context. It was crucial to revise vocabulary structures such as jobs, family, meals, food, daily routines, and weekends ‘routines’, the weather and how it might influence people’s routines in the summer and especially in the winter, interests and hobbies, weekdays, personal determiners, present simple tense of some verbs (eat, work, start, do, talk, there to be, bring, etc.), adverbs of place, quantifiers (a, an, some, any), the time and how it can be organised throughout the day, conjunctions (and, but). Oral and written practice using the vocabulary and grammar structures is also advisable.
Then the students are told to read through the paragraph quickly, ignoring the spaces. After that quick reading they should be able to answer the following question, ‘What is the paragraph about?’
As the text provides a considerably number of spaces, it is suggested a division from 1-15 and then from 16-27. The first half might be done and corrected along with the group of students. However, the second half should be faced as an individual task and at the end the students are questioned about the options they took. If the option chosen happens to be wrong, the reason is explained with examples collected among the students.

1. Elicit from the students the role of words (connected with: jobs, family, meals, food, daily routines, and weekends ‘routines’, the weather and how it might influence people’s routines in the summer and especially in the winter, interests and hobbies) and the contexts where they can be useful;
2. By providing students with examples of family matters (O João tem dois irmãos / O João é filho único / O João é estudante / Os seus pais são médicos) ask them to write more complex sentences where more information about a hypothetical can be seen;
3. Give students examples of more complex sentences, where different verbs, time, tasks and weekdays might help to understand someone’s daily routine;
4. Remind the students that in Portuguese it is possible to begin a sentence with the negative (Não gosto de maçãs.) and without any auxiliary verb or even subject;
5. Give the students examples of complex sentences, where the use of ‘haver’ in the present gets clear;
6. Give the students examples of verbs ending –ar, -er and –ir and the main differences among them for present simple tense;
7. As a more interactive way of practising this particular subject, suggest the students to ask and answer (using regular and irregular verbs) among them about different routines according to the season of the year.