A recurring issue for EFL students is deciding between the infinitive or gerund verb form. It's a decision they face whenever they put more than one verb into a clause and yet, even after years of study, many learners still have difficulty making the right choice.
There are two main reasons for this. First, the infinitive/gerund option probably doesn't exist in the same way in their first language. Second, teachers and learning material often shy away from explaining why the two forms exist and what role they should perform. To students the explanation may feel a bit like this: "want is followed by to and enjoy is followed by -ing because........ just because. Now memorise it!".
Learning the lists of verbs which are followed by to verb or verbing without any deeper understanding is fine for some students, but for others it can be frustrating and what happens when we come across the verbs which weren't on the list?
Ok, so let's do better!
In many languages, unconjugated verbs almost always take the same (infinitive) form - no thinking required, so the distinction between "I like dancing" and "I would like to dance" is probably not at all intuitive to learners. There is a difference however and the two verb forms exist only because they have distinct functions. Let's present some clues:
Have I been to the beach yet?
I want to go to the beach today.
I regret going to the beach today.
I remember going to the beach today.
I was planning to go to the beach today.
I loved going to the beach today.
I would love to go to the beach today.
If you look at the sentences above, whenever the action has yet to occur we use the to go form. In order to choose correctly between the gerund and infinitive, students need to understand the following:
The infinitive is used to describe the second of 2 actions/events
The gerund is used to talk about an action/event which happened before or at the same time.
Some people find this tricky to get their head around (hence the need for examples like the beach one above) and of course there are some exceptions which have to be learnt. The powerpoint below has information and activities which my students found helpful.
n.b. click on the slide itself rather than the page arrows for the animations to work.
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