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Overview of All English Tenses - Present Tenses Overview - Present Continuous

 

Our second example sentence 'I am playing football at the moment.' is the present continuous tense. This has a different structure as the subject 'I', the verb 'to be' in the present tense 'am', 'is' or 'are' plus the verb with an '?ing' on the end. So here: 'I am playing football at the moment.' Whereas the present simple tense is used to talk about habits routines and facts, the present continuous tense is used to talk about actions in progress at the time of speaking or around the time of speaking. Our third example sentence is the present perfect: 'I have played football twice this week.' Here, the structure is the subject 'I', auxiliary verb 'have' or 'has' plus the past participle. The past participle is usually formed just by adding '-ed'- on to the end of the base form of the verb. However, students need to be aware of the many irregular verbs, such as 'know' would change to 'known', 'go' to 'gone', 'understand' ? 'understood' and so on. Unfortunately, there are no rules for this and they just have to be learnt individually.


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 was a reflection of conditionals and reported speech. The various conditional types were clearly expressed with relevant examples. These types are zero, first, second, third and mixed. Typical errors made by students were also highlighted. Being aware of such errors is very useful as it helps me to be prepared for possible mistakes and knowing how to address them. Also reported speech and direct speech were discussed. Adequate description and examples showed the differences and how to convert direct speech into reported speech.



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