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 a very easy worksheet for teaching or revising the interrogative form of the verb to be. Recommended for elementary students who are asked to complete the questions using the words in b ...
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This worksheet focuses on past perfect and presents a compilation of five exercises where students will have to make up their own sentences, fill in the blanks with either past perfect or past sim ...
I made this worksheet as an extra activity for a class in which I aborded past/past perfect tenses and "wish" (past, present and future) subjects, in a class for intermediate level students. ...
The topic of this worksheet is crime. This worksheet is based on the American series called Dexter. It provides lots of grammar exercises for the past simple tense. It includes gap-fill exercises. ...
Pupils learn vocabulary for talking about fruit, vegetables and drinks. They can talk about their likes and dislikes, they learn and practise I like and I don't like. The worksheet provides adjec ...
This worksheet is designed to practice ‘used to’ form. It presents 3 exercises: paraphrasing the sentences, completing the gaps with personal information and speaking based on pictures ...
This grammar worksheet will help your students revise the tense forms such as present simple, continuous and perfect, and also past simple and continuous. There are four exercises where learners w ...
Hello, guys! This worksheet is meant to help you work with past tense of both regular and irregular verbs. Students listen to the song and do as they are told on the worksheet. As a follow up exer ...
This worksheet has 4 simple activities that will help Spanish speaking natives to practice and understand the past tense of verb to be. The students can work in their notebooks or the teacher ...
This is a fill out chart for tenses that have future meaning. It includes present Simple and continuous, future simple and continuous, future perfect and future perfect continuous, and also be go ...
I use this game whenever I study stative verbs with my class. Before the lesson I cut out the sentences and hide the stripes all over the classroom. Then students are divided into two teams: &lsqu ...
This worksheet includes a profound explanation and three exercises to help students distinguish between state and action verbs. It also provides guidance on how one and the same verb can change it ...
The worksheet comprises the most common ways to express future, including future simple (with 'probably', 'definitely'), present continuous, be going to, would like to, would rather, may/ might. S ...
This worksheet is designed for students of beginner and elementary levels and has four exercises to practice different forms of the verb “to be” including positive, negative, question ...
Lifted is a computer-animated short film by Pixar. It tells a story of a young alien taking an examination in alien abduction. Before watching it students are supposed to speculate what the film i ...
This song by the Cure can be used not only for practicing the days of the week but also for the stative verbs. Give students several minutes to look through the lyrics and make up their mind ...
In this worksheet, the names of various sports are introduced, and students learn how to speak about their likes and dislikes using the present simple. Pupils learn the structure like, don't like, ...
In part 1 the students fill in the verbs into a story using either simple past or past progressive. In part 2 the students insert subordination adverbs into a story. For both sections, multip ...
This is a worksheet for revising the present perfect at intermediate level. There are 2 activities in which students are asked to fill in the gaps with for or since and fill in the gaps with ...
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