This storyboard follows a short repeating storyline across five days of a week. Each day of the week depicts a verb from a lexical aspect class, from Monday to Thursday: activity, accomplishment, achievement, state. Friday is the “punchline” day.
A man comes home expecting to see his children eating dinner but instead they are busy doing something else. He asks the babysitter or older sister why the children aren’t eating dinner and says that tomorrow he expects to see them eating dinner. He recounts the day to his wife (who arrives home later than him). The same thing happens over the week until Friday when he finds the children in the backyard picking berries, to which the babysitter/older sister points out that they are indeed eating.
There are opportunities to elicit or teach the target aspect class in the present and past, possibly future. The achievement and state (Wednesday and Thursday) segments can be presented with ungrammatical and grammatical forms to demonstrate how a speaker would deal with these lexical aspects. The storyboard can be shown with empty speech bubbles or speech bubbles with images inside to display what it being said. The empty speech bubbles can be filled with dialogue in the target language for teaching.
Keywords: aspect, progressive, lexical aspect
Click here for storyboard with subtitles
