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Overview of All English Tenses - Present Tenses - Present Continuous - Teaching Ideas

 

And now we'll take a look at a few teaching ideas for the present continuous tense. The present continuous tense is quite a visual tense. We use it to describe actions that are happening at the present moment. So, we could give our students a picture, such as the one seen here. It is important that in the picture there are many activities going on. The teacher can give a time limit to pairs or small groups. In that time limit, the pairs or small groups will make various sentences based upon what they see in the picture. These sentences may include 'He is taking a picture,' 'He is throwing a boomerang,' 'They are playing with the ball,' 'He is digging a hole.' At the end of the time limit, the teacher will ask for some feedback and get feedback from the pairs and the groupings to see what different sentences they were able to come up with. Hopefully, at the end, the students will have made statements using as many of the pronouns as possible, in this case at least he/she or they.


Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.

This unit explores the difference between the four different present tenses, their uses and particular forms, and rules for their application. It is useful in developing an understanding not only for how the different tenses are used, but common mistakes and how to go about exploring the reason for these mistakes and how to correct them. The unit was also useful in providing different and engaging teaching ideas - thinking about these ideas also made understanding the application of the different tenses to sentences easier to understand.



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