4 - Simple vs Progressive Tenses

Simple vs Progressive Tenses

Introduction to Tenses

Tenses are often thought of as showing ‘time’ – when something happened.

This is a very easy explanation, but is not quite correct for English. The different tenses in the English language often give us a lot more information than just ‘when’. For example:

• how 'complete’ we think an action is 

• how ‘long’ we think it will continue 

• how ‘important’ it is – eg Do we see it as a fact?  

We choose a tense (or ‘verb form’) depending on what we want people to understand about what we are saying.

Simple and Progressive Tenses

In this unit we will be looking at Simple Tenses and Progressive Tenses.

(The Progressive Tenses, and the Perfect Tenses which we will look at in the next Unit, are sometimes referred to as ‘Aspect’ - how we look at an action. However, we feel that it is simpler to call them ‘Tenses’ to avoid confusion.)

Follow the steps below to complete this unit: