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 is a multiple choice selection test adapted to English learners, which focuses on pictures interpretacion of the simple present tense, basic grammar rules, prepositions of place and English ...
The presentation consists of 9 new flashcards with fruit and vegetables: avocado, coconut, raspberry, grapefruit, grape, pineapple, peach and plum and instructions to practice the new vocabulary. ...
This PowerPoint is a short presentation of present perfect. It includes basic information about its form,use, etc. First, it has a short revision of tenses. Hope it helps.
The activity is pretty simple. You can do it even with beginners. There are many tasks to do. First of all, ss are supposed to put the songs in order as they hear. There are 8 different songs in t ...
This paper helps pre-intermediate students to see the verbs used in a narrative. This song provides a nice narrative as well as a particular vocabulary which is quite useful to explore as a task. ...
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I use those crosswords to make the study of the irregular verbs easier for the students. We repeat the same crossword several times, in order to make it automatic. We switch from one crossword to ...
I use those crosswords to make the study of the irregular verbs easier for the students. We repeat the same crossword several times, in order to make it automatic. We switch from one crossword to ...
This worksheet has been designed for elementary young learners, bearing in mind the difficulties they encounter in using the present simple and the present continuous tense in a single sentence. T ...
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A complete worksheet covering vocabulary, song's message, and the present continuous drill. Appropriate for a review activity. To activate previous knowledge it starts with a vocabulary acti ...
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