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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Written test for the 5th grade. It starts with a text; then a true/ false exercise; completing sentences; aswering about the text; asking questions; completing (verbs exercise); labeling about hum ...
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This is a 2-page worksheet for teaching or revising the present perfect tense at pre-intermediate level. There are 4 different activities in which students are asked to fill in the gaps with ...
This writing worksheet asks students to present the given information using the appropriate tenses. It can be adjusted to include targeted vocabulary and expressions. "You are applying for a ...
This worksheet is an adapted version of the Business Alibi Game originally by UsingEnglish.com. Yesterday at 2:35 pm a laptop with very important data on it was stolen from a manager’s desk. ...
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This is a simple exercise to help your students practice writing using the simple present tense. It can be adjusted to include the targeted vocabulary or expressions that they have learned. " ...
It's a test for the beginning of the year- a placement test- for students who learnt English for 3 years. Exercises can be used for the appropriate grammar or vocabulary part. It contains some gap ...
This worksheet includes some exercises about 'simple past vs present perfect' and 'simple past vs past perfect' for intermediate level students. It also contains some exercises about conjunctions ...
This worksheet can help your students understand better the verbs which can be used in gerund forms and which cannot. It can be especially useful for intermediate and upper-intermediate students w ...
This is a pretty easy worksheet for teaching or revising modal verbs: will and won't at elementary level. There are 2 different activities in which students are asked to use will or won&rsquo ...
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