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 worksheet will help your students to practise making negative sentences and questions in past simple with irregular verbs. They already have the affirmative ones and just have to complete the ...
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It's a great song to make beginner students understand the usage of the verbs in Present Simple, according to the pronouns. They have the words that are missing already, so they must listen and co ...
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This worksheet can be used to help students to understand the use of the future (will and contractions). The vocabulary is easy and students can understand the lyrics. They listen the song and com ...
The following worksheets consist of two pages about the past tense. They emphasize the difference between regular and irregular verbs and start with a presentation, followed by practice, and endin ...
I hope you can make good use of this worksheet made specially for ESL students from Brazil. Start by eliciting the questions they should write. Then, ss go in pairs and ask each other the question ...
This is a short text adapted from a blog presenting an interview in reported speech. I have created questions to help students understand the text and also help them prepare for a role play. There ...
Practice using adverbs of frequency with this game. This is a game for two. You will need a token each. Game rules: 1. Place your tokens at the bottom of the ladder. 2. In turns, ask each oth ...
This is a PowerPoint presentation about a unique Russian peninsula called Kamchatka. In this material you can find some information about Kamchatka's nature, houses and people while looking at the ...
This section is aimed at training the use of the Present Simple tense to speak about your daily routine. The workseet is based on the episode from the Disney cartoon Tangled (2010). The tasks tar ...
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You can teach simple present tense, the rule of the third person and the auxiliaries Do and Does. You can also teach vocabulary. There are two pages, the first one you look for the vocabulary, the ...
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