Dear Dr. Zack,

Can you please give me some advice on how to explain to beginning level students the concept of Present, Past and Continuous verb tenses?

Thanks for your advice

Richard

Dear Richard,

This is a very good question. Beginning level students seem to always have difficulty in understanding the different forms of Verbs.

Here is how I would teach these different Verb Forms:

For Present Tense, I would explain to the students that the action is currently happening at that time. For example, Using the verb walk, for Present Tense I would say " I walk". At the same time, I would walk in front of them at the front of the class.

For Past Tense, I would explain to the students that the action has already occurred.I would give them the sentence "I walked",and I would walk in front of the class and then stop.

For the Continuous Tense, I would explain to the students that the action is ongoing. Here, I would give the example of the sentence "I am walking" and then walk in front of the students and then continue to walk as a way to show them that the action has not stopped and is ongoing.