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:
1. Read an overview of 'The 5 Cs of CLIL'. Use one of the online dictionaries to look up any words you do not know.
2. Read the Language Focus on:
You can download the Language Focuses as PDFs here: The Simple Tenses.pdf and The Progressive Tenses.pdf
Then return to this page.
3. Practise the language points using the exercises below:
4. Link to other websites where you can read more about the language point, or do further practice:
Present Simple or Progressive gapfill:
Present Simple or Progressive gapfill:
Mixed Tenses:
