Verb Tenses
Tenses are used to communicate whether a verb began in the past or not; whether it’s finished; and whether it’s immediate, temporary, or permanent. Insights consolidates the various uses of a tense into one key thing to remember for each, as well as draws connections between different tenses.
Past Basic
Present Perfect
Progressive / Continuous
Future Forms
Will vs. Be Going To
Present Perfect Continuous
RECOMMENDATION: First visit the Present Perfect and Progressive/Continuous pages.
Past Perfect
RECOMMENDATION: Visit the Present Perfect page first.
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Key Concepts
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Discourse Topics
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10TK Topics
feature videos of 10 THINGS TO KNOW about that topic. These pages also include bonus notes and a few additional things to know.
Appendices
only with Insider Access
Check out our interactive list of Time Expressions. In the search box, type in ‘Simple’, ‘Continuous’, or ‘Perfect’ to filter down to the time expression that work best for whichever tense you’re teaching or studying. Or click on a category to group common words together (for example, clicking on ‘Lexical Class’ will group all the adverbs together and all the prepositions together).
General Notes
Colored Text
Our videos feature selective colored text. Colors stand out and help students know what to pay attention to. We’re rather consistent with our color choices so that students learn to expect certain things from certain colors. We recommend using this same technique yourself. Read our article to learn more.
In the Tenses series, we use blue for past, red for present, and green for future.
Focus on Structure & Usage
Most of our methods are all about either sentence structure or usage. We touch on forms of individual words less often, and we hardly ever address infection or pronunciation. All five of these are important, but form and pronunciation tend to be more straightforward, so we let teachers decide for themselves how to present those. We dedicate our resources to the trickier stuff.
Working in Phrases
Most of the time when we say ‘noun’, we actually mean ‘noun phrase’, which typically includes determiners (like articles, possessives, and quantifiers) and sometimes adjectives. We often do the same with verb strings; auxiliary verbs, ‘not’, and sometimes adverbs are included when we say ‘verb’.
Within the framework of a sentence, combining all those individual words into one block is generally helpful, as they act together to serve a single purpose.
American English
We mostly use American English, although most ESOL books primarily use British English. We do this because our founder and lead content creator is American, so it’s what comes natural to him. Just think of this as an excuse to teach your students some of the differences between British English and American English.