2. Tenses
• The English Tense System
• The links below are to lessons for each of the
12 basic tenses. In each lesson we look at two
aspects of the tense:
• Structure: How do we make the tense?
• Use: When and why do we use the tense?
3. • Some lessons look at additional aspects, and most of
them finish with a quiz to check your understanding.
• Many English learners worry too much about tense. If
you stopped 100 native English speakers in the street
and asked them about tense, 1 of them might give you
an intelligent answer - if you were lucky. The other 99
would know little about terms like "past perfect" or
"present continuous". And they would know nothing
about aspect, voice or mood. But they can all speak
fluent English and communicate effectively. Of course,
for ESL it helps to know about tenses, but don't
become obsessed with them. Be like those native
speakers! Speak naturally!
4. Present Tense
• Present Tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense whose
principal function is to locate a situation or
event in present time.The term "present
tense" is usually used in descriptions of
specific languages to refer to a particular
grammatical form or set of forms; these may
have a variety of uses, not all of which will
necessarily refer to present time
6. Past Tense
• The past tense is a grammatical tense whose
principal function is to place an action or
situation in past time. In languages which
have a past tense, it thus provides a
grammatical means of indicating that the
event being referred to took place in the past
8. Future Tense
• future tense is a verb form that marks the
event described by the verb as not having
happened yet, but expected to happen in the
future.
9. example
• s + modal + v1 + c
• I will do my assignment with the best
