Hi KJ,

I think your example practice exercise is fine - though there is one inherent difficulty with practice of 'would do' and even 'used to do' ie that in discourse it tends to be used like a spice in a recipe to introduce a sense of routine and a connotation of nostalgia. But it sounds funny if it's used more than a couple of times in a short piece of discourse - like an overspiced dish.

About the underlying distinction, I would say firstly that this is one for high int to advanced levels. They ought to already know 'used to do' and the distinction between this and past simple pretty well. The basic point is that we're not dealing here with differences. It's not 'either / or' as it tends to be with past simple vs present perfect etc. The distinction is one of range - and I think that to really cover it you need to bring in the past simple. Basically, past simple can be used for any past state or event whether a single action or repeated. I combed my hair could be a one-off or could represent my routine depending on the context. Then 'used to do' is a subsection of this. It's for past states or events that lasted for a while. I used to comb my hair can't refer to a single event! And 'would do' is even more restricted. It's for repeated events. You could say 'When I was a child, my mother would comb my hair every night' but not 'When I was young, my mother would love my hair.'

So, anyway, I think that on the level of concept, a Venn diagram, with past simple in the big circle, used to do a smaller circle inside and would do a smaller circle inside that one is a good visual representation of this. Given the fact that these uses tend to be embedded in anecdotes, I think that a text-based approach works well. Firstly using the texts for comprehension practice and then getting students to match the different verb forms to their function.

For practice, I think a controlled practice / reinforcement exercise with alternatives is a good one. Students read a text of another anecdote and they have to decide for each verb whether ONLY the past simple is possible, whether the past simple and used to are BOTH possible or whether ALL THREE are possible. They cross out whichever forms are NOT possible in each case. Something like this:

When I was a child, my grandad took / used to take / would take me to see Chelsea play whenever they were at home. He didn't have / didn't use to have / wouldn't have a car so we had to go by bus. It took / used to take / would take ages to get there because everyone was either going to the game or out shopping on King's Road. Anyway, when we arrived, we went / used to go / would go straight to the hotdog stand. Back then, no one knew / used to know / would know how bad they were for you! etc

I'll never forget one particular match ... etc

In feedback you can reinforce the basic underlying concept simply by pointing again to the Venn diagram and then make the general point about avoiding overuse of 'would do' for this meaning. Spice is a good analogy to use - I've found students get the point this way. For practice, students could write up a similar account, probably using 'would do' only a couple of times. But this is important in itself. I think that getting a feeling for the frequency and density of use of language is important in itself. Overuse is as bad as underuse.

Other follow up exercises could be grammar auctions, correction of texts etc. But as a general rule, I think that relatively subtle and infrequent grammatical structures like this are very unlikely to become part of students' actual competence, so if that's the case, it makes sense to focus on consciousness raising rather than practice as the main thrust of our teaching.

Martin McMorrow, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand