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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You can print, laminate and cut out these flashcards. Put students in pairs. Distribute 10 cards to each student, out of these 10 a student chooses 6 and his friend reads the future for him/h ...
My point is grammar. I love creating different grammar tasks. This time I’ve decided to come up with something special for checking my students’ grammar. There are 45 sentences, some ...
This worksheet is intended to review and work on some of the structures of the verb to be in its different uses (roles, descriptions, localization, there is/are, present continuous). It incl ...
This PPT is really useful to start teaching writing. This exercise requires basic grammar and vocabulary that beginner students have, such as present simple and order of adjectives. It also explai ...
This particular worksheet has been designed having in mind elementary students who wish to practise I like and I don't like + the gerund form. There are illustrations for them to have something in ...
I've found out that this Adele's song is a perfect acivity for the present perfect tense revision and introduction. The worksheet contains the original lyrics where your ss have to fill in the bl ...
This is a poem worksheet with very interesting tasks for your students. The worksheet includes an original poem, the explanations of how to create a lesson and a short passage explaining the histo ...
The pre-intermediate kids whom I teach absolutely hate fantasy movies and comedies, so I decided to engage them into the conversation and learning by offering a movie "Krampus: the Christmas evil" ...
This worksheet is intended to work with present continuous. It has some contrast with the present simple, particularly in regard with collocations, but it's mostly about present continuous. I used ...
I often use such tables to help my elementary students make their monologues logical and easier to remember. After having worked with the chart your students will be able to reproduce their story ...
This PowerPoint presentation is about past continuous. It includes the use, the form etc. There are many images and examples that will help your learners make a difference between simple past and ...
Last summer I attended a SEN course and learnt about a way to help my students acquire irregulars. Nobody likes memorising things (at least I don't), so I decided to make this worksheet. Irregular ...
This worksheet is a quick exercise where children move around in class in order to find someone who can or can't do specific activities which are listed in the worksheet. They ask: Peter, can you ...
236-word paragraph with 20 Third Person Singular (present simple) grammar mistakes: 'Jon's Daily Routine' with answer key on page 2. Approximate time: 15 minutes. Use this activity to lead into ...
This is a simple worksheet to practise past simple (positive, negative and interrogative forms). It contains regular verbs only as it's created to be used when introducing past simple. It is desig ...
My students would always ask me how to pronounce some irregulars. So I decided to make this list and help them (and myself).I took the list of irregulars they have in their books and made it. I al ...
It is a worksheet about the present progressive tense, where you can develop reading comprehension skills and practice the grammar. Students can practice and improve their vocabulary u ...
I made this list of irregulars for my students. They would always ask me how to pronounce verbs in the 2nd and 3rd columns, so I decided to make my life easier. :) I used the irregulars they had i ...
This worksheet contains a gap filling exercise contrasting the past simple and past continuous tenses through the story of Cinderella. Students are asked to complete the sentences using the past s ...
January 31st is a backwards day: you can use these cards (after cutting and pasting them on a cardboard sheet) to review opposites in a funny way. Then you can read the story to indroduce or talk ...
This is a word search activity handout. Below are 18 present tense verbs. Find their present perfect equivalents. Time limit: 12 minutes. Example: 'be' - 'been'. The answer key is provided ...
Listen to the song and complete the gaps. You could use this worksheet to introduce past perfect. You can also use it to introduce contractions of modal verb and the verb to be. Suggested link to ...
This is a worksheet where you can practice the use of the present simple and present perfect tenses using Beyonce song called "I was here". This activity will take at least 1 hour to be completed. ...
There are 4 exercises so students can study/ revise the present perfect simple including keywords (already, just, yet, for, ever, since) and been or gone. 1. Sentences to complete with affirmative ...
Students are asked to fill the sentences with the irregular verbs from the box in the correct form. The verbs are in different colours to show which verbs have similar past simple forms. Many stud ...
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