Exercises are crucial for intermediate ESL students. These exercises need to reinforce the lessons that they've already learned so that the information becomes second nature to students. There are certain tricky concepts that intermediate students must master before they continue on to even harder grammar points at higher levels. Exercises in writing, grammar and conversation must reinforce these challenging concepts.

Definite and Indefinite Articles
Before going on to a more advanced level, ESL students need to master articles. Print out a simple worksheet with incomplete sentences and have students fill in the appropriate articles where necessary, such as "a," "an," or "the."

Students' scores on this exercise are a good indication of how well they understand the use of articles, especially if you include some tricky sentences to gauge how well they were paying attention when you went over some of the more difficult or hard to remember exceptions.

Students simply cannot keep making basic mistakes with articles at the upper intermediate or advanced levels.

The Present Perfect
At the intermediate level, students should be completely familiar with all uses of the present perfect and be able to use them in conversation mostly without error.

To practice this, you could put students into pairs and simply tell them to talk to each other about: things they have done at an unspecified time, things they have done recently, and things that have happened to them so far this day, week or month. Have them make sentences with the words "since" and "for." Tell students that, for each category, they simply have to use the present perfect. You should be able to hear rather easily if they are speaking without mistakes or not.

Writing About the Past and Present
At the intermediate level, students should be able to switch correctly between tenses when they refer to moments in the past versus moments now or in the future. A great way to test this is to simply ask students to write an essay where they compare their desires and goals at a younger age versus now, and how they hope they will be in the future. Ask students to give clear reasons and examples.