Past continuous

What is past continuous? When is past continuous? Read on for detailed descriptions, examples, and past continuous exercises. It also expresses that two on-going situations were happening at the same time in the past.

We generally use the past continuous to talk about actions and states in progress (happening) around a particular time in the past. We use it to say what we were in the middle of doing at a particular moment in the past.

Note that continuous tenses are also called progressive tenses. The present continuous and past continuous tenses (also called present progressive and past progressive) are used when we are describing actions that continue for a period of time in the present or in the past.

The main concept to relay when teaching the past continuousis the idea that the past continuous expresses an interrupted action. In other words, the past continuous speaks about what was going on when something important happened.

Students are given a list of strange actions and ask their partners to come up with innocent reasons why they were doing those things, e. It is used: Often, to describe the background in a story written in the past tense, e. The past continuous can be used by itself to express what happened at a precise moment in the past. Read the explanation to learn more.

The past simple shows us that an action was in the past, not in the present.

Grammar explanation. For example ‘the animals were running gracefully through the field. This is an easy concept to understand and once you have mastered it, you will be able to speak much more freely about the past.

This tense can be used alone or can be combined with past simple tense to show that an action or event happened in the middle of another action. It gives a sense of the order of events and when events of the. I was snowboarding. However, the most common use is together with the past simple (when something happened).

You might want to consider teaching the past simple together with the past continuous for intermediate level classes, as the past simple will be review for students. Begin teaching the past continuous by telling a story with exaggerated details through the use of the past continuous. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, and the children were playing games peacefully.

At that moment, I saw Alex and fell in love. Point out how the past continuous is used to paint a picture of the scene. The Answer Sheet is available for download below. Past Continuous Accusations.

This tense is used to talk about an action at a particular time in the past. It expresses past actions having an on-going nature.

An action, that continued for some time in the past, is expressed in the past continuous tense. The examples for the past continuous are similar to the past simple combinations, with the key difference being that many of these focus more on the process than a complete past action.

Sometimes the reason for using the past continuous will require more information (for example some of these sentences might make more sense with an interrupting action), or in some cases we need to connect the.

Anglo-Link Recommended for you. In Spanish, the past continuous or past progressive is used to talk about continuous actions in the past, especially when they are interrupted by another action.

Providing variable practice activities and tapping into students’ own experiences will provide an experiential way of practicing what could have been just another boring grammar point. In this past continuous memory game, students study a picture for three minutes and then write past continuous sentences about what was happening in the picture.

Give each student a copy of the park scene picture. For three minutes, students look carefully at the picture of what was happening in the park yesterday afternoon and try to remember what the people were doing.