Does this happen to you? You prepare well before an interview. Yet, when the real thing comes, you can’t speak a word. You wonder why it happens to you. ‘Why me?’ So what are you going to do to save yourself?
There are lots of ways, one of which is to have a better understanding of how English tenses work. So how do English tenses work?
An Interview Question for You
Well, before you get the answer, you have to answer a question, a question that you have to answer (all the time) in an interview. What is it?
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Well, (there are) usually 2 answers for this tough question:
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a. I left my job
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because
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I wasn’t enjoying it
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b. I left my job
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because
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I did not enjoy it.
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So which one is correct? Well, wrong question to ask. They are both correct, but the point is: What is the difference between ‘was+enjoy+ing‘ and ‘enjoy in the simple past‘?
Past Tenses in your Interview
You may think that ‘was+enjoy+ing‘ happens with a time shorter than ‘enjoy in the simple past‘. Well, you may be right, but not in this context, the context of an interview.
So what is the difference in the context of an interview? To know the difference, check out the picture below, what do you see?
Well, you see a beautiful woman, right? But sorry this is not the point. The point is the two in the background, which is the key to the answer. What do I mean? I mean can you see clearly the two persons in the background? No.
In other words, the foreground is clear but the background is not. Yes. So what is my point? How does that relate to interview English, and to the two past tenses?
The answer is: a similar shooting technique is used in English.
In English, and more importantly in your interview, when you want to give background information about your past, you use ‘was+verb+ing‘. Need extra examples? There are two more for your interview:
What are the most difficult decisions to Make?
Can you describe a difficult work situation?
(pic source)
So you may say: I was working on a project when one of our competitors stole our new concept.
In a word, you can sum up the technique of foreground and background in the following table:
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In the
Foreground |
the simple past
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(e.g. enjoyed)
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In the Background
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was+verb+ing
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(e.g. was enjoying)
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Moving beyond Interviews to your Daily Life
You can, of course, apply the same technique to your daily life:
a. We reached the store and they were just closing the doors.
b. I was having lunch with the CEO of Orange & Apple yesterday, and suddenly I saw my friend.
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References:
1. Biber, D., et al. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Pearson Education Limited.
2. Downing and Locke (2006). English Grammar : A University Course, Routledge.
3. Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Arnold. (Revised by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen).
4. Parrot, M. (2010). Grammar for English Language Teachers,
