Douglas Adams  
   Home  Listening/Speaking |  Grammar |  Reading |  Writing 


Activity links








abridged stories




essay skills

verb choice

end focus



Teaching Vowels

s- endings

note-taking skills


more to come...


created and maintained by
Douglas E. Adams

The Verb Tense System

Language is organized. This may seem like an obvious statement, but if it is in fact true, then why do we so often try to teach it as if it were a list of rules rather than an organized system with predictable patterns and forms that can be inferred by language learners. Of all the skills we try to teach our students, grammar is perhaps the one least often taught as an organized structure, yet grammar is most easy to understand and to teach when we look at it as a complete system rather than a list of rules, and the verb tense/aspect system is no exception.

Let's Look at the big picture...

There are essentially twelve active verb tenses in English*. Four in the past, four in the present, and you guessed it, four in the future. The good news is that because their forms follow an organized pattern, we can boil three of them down to just three basic formulas:

  • the continuous/progressive = "be" + verb + ing
  • the perfect = "have" + past participle[p.p.]
  • the perfect continuous/progressive = "have" + been + verb + ing

where "be" means some form of the verb be, and "have" means some form of the verb have. Note: I prefer to use the term continuous rather than progressive since it better describes the implied continuing nature of a verb in this tense.

The only exceptions to these forms are with the simple tenses (which are, in fact, not all that simple for students after all).

Let's examine the tense system in more detail, and begin with the past tenses.

The Past Tenses [Table Format]
  • simple past = base verb + ed or irregular
         ex: Tom studied math in school.
  • past continuous = was/were + verb + ing
         ex: Tom was studying math in school.
  • past perfect = had + p.p.
         ex: Tom had studied math in school.
  • past perfect continuous = had + been + verb + ing
         ex: Tom had been studying math in school.

Learning the formulas for the past tense verbs is only part of the story, and not the hardest part. The part that troubles students the most is when it comes to knowing how to use these tenses. Grammar doesn't happen in isolation, so let's look at an example in context.

     When Tom was in high school, he decided to be an engineer, and he was always taking apart small machines and examining them. He had been doing this since he was a small child, and had taken many math and science courses since he started school.

In this short example, we can see each of the four past tenses in context, and can ask students to identify them. At this point it becomes possible to ask students when each of these actions happened and place them on a time line to better visualize their relationship to one another. We can use the simple past and past continuous tenses to talk about some actions that happened or were happening at some point in the past. In other words, these tenses place us at some particular point of reference in the past, and show us what things happened or were happening at that point in time...

For example, in Figure 1 we can see that at the point in time when Tom was in high school, two other actions were happening.

  • He decided to be an engineer, and...
  • He was always taking apart small machines and examining them.

It's worth noting that at this point students often ask about the difference between using the simple past and the past continuous. We can address this question through a combination of two things:
  • We often use the continuous form to suggest a feeling that an action continued for a while, and...
  • more importantly, we can let students know that in the vast majority of situations it makes no real difference in meaning whether they use the simple or continuous forms of a verb. There are really only a few verbs/actions that can't be expressed in a continuous form. These are verbs describing actions whose meaning can't/aren't continuous; verbs like know, like, love, hate, exist.... Either someone knows or they don't know, likes or they don't like.

    For example, it doesn't really change the meaning if we write he always took apart small machines and examined them. in the example above. Simply put, language is full of choices and the choice is theirs. [For more on the simple vs. continuous forms, see simple vs. continuous].

Returning to our sample paragraph, we can also notice that the past perfect and past perfect continuous tenses are used to talk about things that happened or were happening before the simple past and past continuous actions. In fact, we can think of the perfect tenses as the before tenses since they are always used for actions that happen before some past point of reference even if that point is merely implied and not directly stated.

For example, in Figure 2 we can see that Tom had taken many math and science courses before he decided to become an engineer, and that he also had been taking apart small machines and examining them for years before he decided to become an engineer**.

** the continuous form of the verb implies that Tom continued to do this even up to the point he decided to become an engineer. This is a common use of the past perfect continuous, but it doesn't have to carry this meaning. He could have been taking these classes for a while, and then stopped taking them at sometime before he later decided to become an engineer.

Essentially this pattern of the simple and continuous tenses establishing a point of reference in time and the perfect and perfect continuous tenses describing actions happening before that point is repeated for all the tenses (past, present, and future).

Let's see how this plays out for the present tenses and examine how the past and present tenses relate to one another. 

*Grammarians would have us distinguish between tense and aspect, but for the purposes of language instruction, it's unnecessary.


page last modified: March 29, 2016

Top of Page Learn more...
Copyright © 2016 Tesltimes.org

Home | Search | Info | Contact
Search maintained by Douglas Adams | Contact Us