Remind Past Tense

  In this video, we provide you with a useful overview of the various past tenses. We focus here especially on the differences between the past perfect and past perfect continuous. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. ↵I have seen that the attitude from the teacher can change the environment in the class, if the teacher is angry, will show a discomfort in the class and can cause the not good willing of the students to participate during the...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. We start off the series with the past simple tense. In this video, we focus on the usages of the past simple tense, which mostly include completed actions at a definite time in the past. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. This module has been pretty broad as well. It has started out by mentioning different levels of English proficiency. Then it went into needs analysis, the syllabus...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. We start off the series with the past simple tense. In this video, we focus on useful teaching ideas for this tense. A great idea to practice this tense is a picture story. Here, the teacher provides the students with various photos or images and the students are asked to piece them together to make a story in the past. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. I found out information...  [Read more]

  The main function for the present perfect tense is to relate something in the past to the present. We can do so in a number of ways. First, we have indefinite past actions. 'I have been to Italy twice'. We're not concerned with when it happened, we just simply want to say that it has happened in the past. It's a fact of something I have done in the past but yet it's still true in the present. Unfinished past actions: 'I have lived here for three years'. I started living here in the past and it's still true now. With this usage, you will typically see time expressions. Finally, we have past actions with present results. I have lost my keys. It's implied that I still haven't found them. I lost them in the past. I don't have them now. I've lost my keys. Below you can read feedback...  [Read more]

  In this video, we provide you with a useful overview of the various past tenses. We focus here especially on the differences between the past simple and past continuous. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. The unit on future tenses covers the following topics: future simple, future continuous, future perfect, future perfect continuous, be going + infinitive, present simple and present continuous. The most interesting part concerning this topic...  [Read more]

  Here are helpful tips how to identify the various past tenses in the English language and complete worksheets successfully. The video also helps you to structure an effective lesson around the past tenses in an EFL classroom around the world. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. In this Unit, I learn of the Dos and Do nots of being in charge of a classroom. Most importantly this chapter showed how I may ensure effectiveness in the classroom. There...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. We start off the series with the past simple tense. This tense is used to express completed actions in the past. In this video, we focus on the structure of the past simple. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. In this unit, Four important aspects of present tenses are detailed introduced:the present simple, present continuous and present perfect and present perfect continuous.After...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. In this video, we take a look at the past perfect tense. This tense is used to talk about a past action and a related past action before that. We relate two past actions to each other. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Through this unit, I have been able to review some old lessons I used to follow when I started to learn English in France. The learning process may be long for a...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. In this video, we take a look at the past continuous tense and suitable teaching ideas for this tense. The past continuous is very conducive to using pictures and talking about actions. We give our group of students cards with images and ask them to create sentences for what the people in the picture were doing at a certain time in the past. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. This...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. In this video, we take a look at the past perfect tense and suitable teaching ideas for this tense. We'll ask our students to describe what a person in a picture had just done before the photo was taken. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. First in this section, we covered modals. Modals express the speakers feeling or attitude towards a particular verb. They include the words could,...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. In this video, we take a look at the past continuous tense and how it is formed and used. This tense is used to indicate that a certain action was in progress at a particular time in the past. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. This unit gives a concise explanation of the various present tense forms and how they are formed and used properly in a sentence. It goes further to...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. We start off the series with the past simple tense. In this video, we show you how to execute a mill drill activity for this tense. Here, the teacher provides the students with a survey or questionnaire with statements in the past simple tense. The students then go around the classroom and ask other students about their past experiences. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. The basics...  [Read more]

  This video is part of our series on the past tenses in English. In this video, we take a look at the past perfect continuous tense. This tense is used to talk about two actions in the past focusing on the fact that one of the two actions had been continuing at another point in the past. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. I never realized that present simple was considered a future tense. This course breaks down the tenses into manageable...  [Read more]

  Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. Speaking and writing are the productive skills. While speaking and writing are substantially different in many ways, they both are used for the same purpose-to communicate. Communication between people is a very complex and ever changing thing. But there are generalizations that we can make which have particular relevance for the teaching and learning of languages. If a teacher wishes to introduce a...  [Read more]

  Now we'll have a look at the present perfect tense. The form for the present perfect tense is again our subject here, our auxiliary verb, or helping verb, in this case it's 'have'. For subjects 'I,' 'you,' 'we,' 'they', we leave the auxiliary verb as 'have'. For 'he,' 'she' and 'it', our auxiliary verb needs to be conjugated or changed into 'has'. Following these helping verbs, we have our main verb in the past participle form. Here we have the verb 'to play'. 'To play' is a regular verb. So for regular verbs we simply add '-ed'. The result is sentences such as 'I have played football today,' or 'He has played snooker today'. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken...  [Read more]

  Here now is a teaching idea for the present perfect tense. If you remember back, one of the main usages of the present perfect tense is to talk about past experiences at an indefinite time. Here, will be having students work in small groups. Each small group will receive a prompt. This prompt has various past experiences. However, not conjugated into the question. The challenge for the students will be to take one of these prompts and to create a question based upon it. For example here they see 'win' and 'a competition'. One at a time, the students will take turns forming the question. 'Have you ever won a competition?' The other people listening to the question in the small group, will exchange their past experiences, either 'Yes, I have,' and perhaps tell a bit about the...  [Read more]

  Another idea for the present continuous tense focuses on the action of miming. Because it's in the present continuous tense, it'll be critical that the student, who is doing miming, continues to do the miming as the students guess what he or she is doing. In order to do this, the teacher will ask one student to come to the front of the class and present them with a card. The card at low levels will just be one word such as 'sleeping,' 'surfing,' 'eating,' or 'playing'. As soon as the student is able to mine any one of those actions, the students continue to guess with 'You are sleeping,' 'You are eating,' 'You are surfing.' Now at higher levels what you could do is continue on from the base of the action and include something like 'You are playing football,' or 'You are playing...  [Read more]

  We'll begin our examination of all the tenses by first looking at the present tense. There are four present tenses and we'll begin with the present simple tense. It's the most common tense in the English language as it talks about things in general, general facts, routines, habits. Those are usages that we'll look at in a little while but first let's focus on the form of the tense. Here, we've got our subjects 'I', 'you', 'we', 'they' and the base form of the verb followed by the rest of our sentence. Here for the 'he', 'she' and 'it' subjects, we have to conjugate our verb and in this case we've added an '-es' for 'teaches' followed by the rest of our sentence. With subjects 'I', 'you', 'we' and 'they' the pattern stays the same throughout we use the base form of the verb....  [Read more]

  And now we'll take a look at a few teaching ideas for the present continuous tense. The present continuous tense is quite a visual tense. We use it to describe actions that are happening at the present moment. So, we could give our students a picture, such as the one seen here. It is important that in the picture there are many activities going on. The teacher can give a time limit to pairs or small groups. In that time limit, the pairs or small groups will make various sentences based upon what they see in the picture. These sentences may include 'He is taking a picture,' 'He is throwing a boomerang,' 'They are playing with the ball,' 'He is digging a hole.' At the end of the time limit, the teacher will ask for some feedback and get feedback from the pairs and the groupings to...  [Read more]

  Now here's a teaching idea for the present perfect continuous tense. If you remember we use this tense to talk about actions that had been continuing up until the present moment or very recently. In this activity, you'll be giving a student a card. That card will include the past activity as well as some results. This card says 'You've been driving in the rain on your motorbike. You're all wet and your clothes are too.' The results are 'you're all wet and your clothes are too.' You'll present that information to the rest of the class and, therefore, it's up to the class to guess the action that was occurring up until the certain point in time. What will happen in this activity is, the student at the front of the room will express the present results 'clothes being wet; I'm all...  [Read more]

One of the worst teaching experience is having a class come to an abrupt halt while someone searches a dictionary for a specific word, one usually not found in the end anyway. The problem of using dictionaries as a crutch could be rectified by not allowing the use of them in a lesson at all. The great art of circumlocution could be used instead, albeit kicking and screaming. Those experiences of being derailed by frantic dictionary searches would make any ESL teacher shudder and swear off dictionaries entirely. Should native language to English language dictionaries be banned altogether' Some would argue that using dictionaries is a good technique to use in the classroom. One that actually helps to create a more independent learner ( www.tefl.net/teacher_training). The...  [Read more]

  The present perfect always relates the past to the present. This can be through the unfinished past, where we're expressing duration, such as 'I have played football for 10 years,' the indefinite past expressing experience in your life, such as 'I have been to Italy and Spain,' and also to show the present results of a past action 'I have broken my leg.' I broke it in the past and it remains broken in the present. Our final present tense is the present perfect continuous tense. Our example sentence here 'I have been playing football for 10 years' has the structure subject plus auxiliary verb 'have' or 'has' and then a second auxiliary verb here 'being' plus 'verb-ing'; 'I have been playing.' Very much like the present perfect tense, the present perfect continuous relates the past...  [Read more]

  Now here are some teaching ideas for the future continuous tense. Here, we have an activity where we'll be asking students to spontaneously make some excuses based upon some invitations. We can do this in pairs or small groups. The teacher will have cut these cards up and the students will place them into a pile, randomly picking up a card. So one student might pick this card up and say 'Would you like to play tennis with me tomorrow?' The other student will be challenged to come up with an excuse as quickly as possible, which might be 'No, I'm sorry I'll be working.' Then, we have the next student pick up the next card and we challenge an additional student to make an excuse. Here we have another teaching idea for the future continuous tense and this involves two students trying...  [Read more]

  Now, let's take a look at the present continuous tense. The continuous tense is used to talk about actions in progress at the time of speaking or around the time of speaking. The first thing to notice with the continuous tense is that we must use the verb plus '-ing' form, also known as the present participle. You'll see it in any continuous tense, especially with the present continuous. We have three different forms of this tense. First, we have the subject 'I' used with 'am teaching'. Then, we have 'you', 'we' and 'they are teaching'. Finally, we've got 'he', 'she' 'it is teaching'. The 'am', 'are' and 'is' are forms of the verb 'to be' and here with this tense is used as an auxiliary verb or a helping verb. In order to form negative sentences, we simply add the word 'not'...  [Read more]

  And now we'll have a look at the present perfect continuous tense. As its name suggests, what we're going to do is combine the present continuous usages and the present perfect usages into a tense that basically expresses the fact that we've got an action continuing up until the present point in time. For the form of this tense, again, we're going to combine into various aspects of both the perfect and the continuous tenses. If we have a look we always begin with our subjects, then we have our, two now, helping verbs. The helping verb 'to have' for the perfect tenses, as well as the helping verb 'be' for the continuous tenses. For our subjects 'I', 'you', 'we' and 'they', we leave 'have' as 'have' and for 'he', 'she' and 'it', we conjugate it to 'has'. Because it's a continuous...  [Read more]

  Here's an idea for teaching the present perfect continuous tense. However in this activity what the students will be doing, is comparing and contrasting this tense with the present perfect tense. This is something that a teacher will want to do after they've explored both tenses and because both tenses are quite confusing, we'll ask the students to compare and contrast the two, making sure that they can tell the difference. In this activity, the teacher will have cut out each individual card. The teacher will distribute the cards to the students and after a minute has gone by, the teacher will then ask the students to fold their cards over and get into a pair. One student in the pair will then present a certain result and ask the student to form the question. Here, with the...  [Read more]

  As mentioned earlier, to form this tense, we have to use a special form of the verb. Technically it's called the past participle form with irregular verbs. Of course these past participle forms change quite a bit from its base form of the verb. Here are a few examples 'go' moves to 'gone', 'be' moves to 'been', 'write' to 'written', 'speak' to 'spoken' and 'read'. Although very confusing for the non-native speaker, doesn't change its spelling, but does change its pronunciation, resulting in 'read' going to 'read'. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured...  [Read more]

  The two most common usages for the present continuous tense as it relates to speaking about things in the present. We have actions in progress at the time of speaking, specifically right when it's being said. So I can say ?I am teaching right now.? However, we also have actions in progress around the time of speaking. ?I'm reading a good book.? Now, of course I'm not reading a book just now but I started reading a book in the past I am reading it perhaps today sometime and I'll finish reading the book at some point in the future. Again, I'm not doing it just now but around the time of speaking. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus...  [Read more]

  We can see that this particular usage of the unfinished past can be used for both the present perfect and the present perfect continuous. Where we've got action verbs, we usually prefer to use the present perfect continuous. However, there are state verbs which don't usually go into the continuous form, such as 'know'. We would say 'I have known her for 10 years,' not 'I have been knowing her for 10 years.' So when we have these state verbs, such as 'know', 'be', 'seem' and 'appear', we would usually put these in the present perfect but with the action verbs, such as 'play', 'cook', 'work', we will use these in the present perfect continuous. Normally, we also use the present perfect continuous fairly frequently with words, such as just or recently to express a recently completed...  [Read more]

  The two most common usages for the present simple tense are habits and routines, as well as general facts and truths. Our example of routine would be 'I teach every Monday.' We've used our subject 'I', our base form 'teach' and 'every Monday' speaking about the routine that I have. We also have our general facts 'The sun rises in the east.' Here, 'the sun' would follow under the pronoun 'it' so we've had to conjugate our verb per our pattern and finish our sentence. We could also talk about general truths such as likes or dislikes. 'I like football,' or 'He likes football.' Of course, there are other usages but these are the two most common. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online...  [Read more]