The grammatical explanation to English simple past tense contains the information about the formal features and functions of simple past tense, as well as special emphasis on the guideline: don’t rely on temporal adverbials to judge the event time.

Students hear or read some sentences and each utterance contains the target form: these are the simple past tense sentences with no temporal adverb as clues. Students are required to attend to the past tense morpheme -ed to get meaning.

There are two kinds of activities. For the first kind, there is only one correct answer. When listening to or reading a sentence, students have to process the past tense marker -ed to decide when the event took place, past or present. See the following example:

Past Present [sentence heard by learners]

□ □ David received a lot of money from advertising.

In another activity, students are required to process meaning-bearing input and express an opinion or a belief. For example, students hear or read many past tense sentences with no temporal adverbs. They should express their opinions about whether they also did similar things in the past.

Benati, A. G., & Lee, J. F. (2008). Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instruction: Secondary and Cumulative Effects (pp. 99-101). Bristol; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters.