martes, 26 de febrero de 2013

Real English series: Present continuous

The videos in the Real English series this week all have to do with the present continuous. There are four videos in total and they are all intended for Básico 1 and Básico 2 students.

The grammar behind the present continuous is quite simple We use the present continuous to describe activities we are doing at the moment of speaking. The four videos today deal with this meaning of the present continuous.

This is the structure: Subject + am/are/is + V-ing.

The main difficulty of the videos lies in the vocabulary the speakers sometimes use and their accents, but remember that you can watch the same video with subtitles on the Real English site.

The first video is an introduction to the present continuous with the question What are you doing?



You can do an interactive exercise here and watch the same clip with subtitles here.

In the second video Laurie tells us what she is doing now, what she is carrying in her briefcase, and the clothes she is wearing.



You can read the transcript of what she says here.

In the third video a number of people tell us what they are doing. It is good practice, as we see a number of people describing what they are doing while they are doing it. There is more variety of activities, too.



You can do an interactive exercise on the Real English site here and watch the same video with subtitles here.

It is also important that you drop by this lesson on the Real English site because you will find a very good explanation of the different meaning of the present continuous. On this post we are just dealing with the most basic meaning -activities we are doing at the moment of speaking-, but there is more to it than that.

There is one more video on the present continuous. This time all the speakers answer the question What are you wearing? The present continuous is the tense we use to describe the clothes we are wearing at the moment of speaking.



You can watch the same video with subtitles here and do an interactive exercise here.