While some aspects of a new language are fairly easy to teach, tenses can pose a challenge because they vary so much from one language to another. ESL teachers - particularly new ones - tend to struggle a little with teaching tenses, because it’s not always easy to explain exactly how a given tense works in English; or how it contrasts with other, similar tenses. Throw in the problem of teaching tenses in ways that keep students active, interested, and learning, and you’ve got a recipe for a difficult lesson on your hands.
Not all teachers handle these issues in the same ways. The classic approach would be simply to drill students on grammar until they get it right - but that approach has fallen out of use, in favor of a more integrated teaching method that combines speaking, reading, activities, and other forms of learning. The challenge for the modern ESL teacher, then, is to find ways of presenting each tense that enable the students not only to learn it correctly, but also to be able to produce it and use it dynamically in sentences.
That’s exactly where BusyTeacher.org’s 4,456 verb tense worksheets come in. They’re designed by real ESL teachers to help students see how each tense is used, see examples of different applications for it, and practice using it in all kinds of different exercises. With these worksheets, teaching tenses turns from a dull repetitive process into an engaging series of learning activities, that’ll inspire your students to take what they’ve learned out of the classroom and use it in their actual English conversations.
Our 4,456 tense worksheets cover each tense in the book, from present simple to future perfect continuous - and all things in between. They cover singular and plural verbs, irregular verbs, active and passive verbs, positive and negative verbs, and every other form of a verb you want to teach. In combination with the more rigorous rules laid down in your school’s textbook, these worksheets will give students the practice they need to understand every way in which English verbs can be formed.
In addition to all the verb forms our worksheets cover, they’ll also help you introduce variety into your classroom in another way: by giving you a wide variety of different exercises for practicing verbs in various situations. Some of our worksheets, for example, include simple examples and fill-in-the-blank exercises - while others will help your students organize little drama presentations, play games like “pronoun dice” or a quiz show, or read silly stories and lyrics to popular songs - all targeted at teaching the rules for using one particular verb tense or set of tenses.
These worksheets have been proven to work in classrooms of ESL teachers around the world - and in fact, that’s exactly who contributed them to this site. They’re all free to download and use without any registration, and you’re even free to submit your own worksheets if you’d like - just click the “Submit a worksheet” button at the bottom of this page, and join our international community of English teachers helping English teachers!
All our worksheets can be previewed in thumbnail view before you click and download them - so just take a scroll down this page, see what catches your eye, and try out anything that looks interesting in your classroom. We guarantee you’ll love the results!
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This short video activity(please watch out the time on the worksheet) can be used as a warm-up to practice/review present perfect cont. & 2nd conditionals. It also contains some questions abo ...
Listening activity which may be used as a warm-up or a follow-up activity to practice the simple past tense. Students listen to the song and try to write the correct forms of the verbs in the blan ...
It is designed for listening practice particularly while teaching the past simple tense. The song used to be very famous performed by Spice Girls, so the class might enjoy it very much. You just h ...
This song is an easily understandable duet. The worksheet is divided into five activities, mostly requiring simple past and gerund; The 1st and 2nd exercises are to fill ...
This is a song worksheet with blank spaces to fill in. The lyrics are split in two parts, first the students are required to fill in the blanks using only present perfect continuous; then, in the ...
This is a worksheet that I put together for my adult A1 class but I think it would also work well for an A2 class or any other for some good old music culture, for that matter. It contains a biogr ...
This tense chart was made with law enforcement-related example sentences, otherwise it is a normal chart :) I have been teaching law enforcement English for 9 years now, and I made this chart for ...
It is a listening quiz, I use it to teach vocabulary and the simple present tense. I like this song because Taylor Swift is a very popular singer, she sings not too fast and students can hear the ...
This worksheet is really helpful for reviewing house and clothing items and shapes related vocabulary items. It's also appropriate for the present continuous practice. It's suitable for elementary ...
Listening activity for beginners, this is useful to study was/were and verbs in simple past, by the way the song is great! Icludes filling gaps and ordering sentences activities as well. Wor ...
This drama is about a television talent show called World Talent, where contestants from around the world compete to see who is the most talented performer. Each week the contestants perform in fr ...
It's an amazing worksheet about what ss did on their last vacation. You'll find here a wordsearch, questions about what people did last weekend, also activities such as reading comprehensio ...
I have designed this PDT to review the grammar of do/ does and can. Students are asked to write short answers to the questions. It includes two activities and it contains the names of African and ...
Write sentences using present continuous or simple present based on the pictures given. Add an appropriate adverb. Adverbs of frequency or time. Children take a look at pictures and write a sentence.
Students must complete each sentence using the correct form of the verbs in brackets. They also practice the use of adverbs of frequency and other type of adverbs. They must put both the verb and ...
I've designed this worksheet for a class activity which will enable teenage students to work out whether their classmates are adventurous...or not. Students go round the class asking a question st ...
This worksheet helps students to practise time expressions, daily activities and 'do you...?' structure with short answers. It's easy to use- just print it 4 times, two pages for each student ...
It uses the song "Creep" by the British band Radiohead to work on present simple, present progressive and past simple tenses. This is the uncut version so if your students are sensitive to bad lan ...
This worksheet is based on video 3 - unit 3 New Headway Elementary 4th edition; you can use it to revise your students listening skills. They fill in missing (mostly) verbs into the texts. You wil ...
Present perfect vs past simple exercises with key. It can be used as an exercise during the lesson or as homework. It checks if a student can use 'has' instead of 'have' and the third form of irre ...
This is an exam which includes exercises on sense verbs, countable and uncountable nouns, expressions with "have got", when to use "how much / many / a lot of / lots of / too and enough". It also ...
This is a test on questions , negative responses and positive responses with verbs "have" , "do", "like + ing", all in present simple. There are also exercises on adverbs, daily routines, places a ...
This worksheet is designed to be used with a YouTube video. It helps learners practise the use of past tenses to describe what happened in a short film. Play the video using this link: https://www ...
10 65,386ElemPre-IntIntAdv
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