British Council Verb Machine

The Verb Machine is an online game that we can find in the site of the British Council. It will be specially useful to language learners who are unfamiliar with the names of the English tenses and with concepts like active or passive (voice), continuous or simple, and perfect.

As you can see from the screenshot below, there are three options we can choose from to play. The practice mode gives us examples of the different tenses, voice, continuous and perfect mode by just clicking the coloured buttons at the top. It's a kind of theoretical background through examples.

In the tense game, the machines gives you a tense or verb form and an example sentence. You have to press the right coloured buttons at the top to match the verb form.

In the sentence game, you have to press the buttons to make the right verb form, but the machine only shows you a sentence.

The use of the present perfect in English

In early July Tanya Trusler published an entry on the ESL Library blog about the use of the present perfect in English.

She talks about the two main uses of the present perfect, the difference between present perfect and past simple, and the difference between present perfect simple and continuous.

It is a simple, straightforward explanation, but one of the best I have read about a difficult grammar point for many English learners.

Irregular verb wheel

Irregular verb wheel is one of the latest additions to the online MacMillan Dictionary.

It is an addictive online game where students of all levels but especially those in the lower ones, Básico 1 and Básico 2, may put their grasp of irregular verbs to the test.

You have to answer five different questions about each verb with a time limit of two minutes.

The only drawback of the game is that there are no audio files, so students who want to work on the pronunciation of irregular verbs, which are often mispronounced, will have to type in the irregular verb in the search box of the online MacMillan Dictionary or use the great online pronunciation dictionary howjsay, which we dealt with on this entry of the blog.

English verb charts

I discovered English Verb Tenses Explained through Larry Ferlazzo.

English Verb Tenses Explained can help English students to all levels get a quick overview of the English tense system.

They give examples for all the tenses and use a colour code to identify tenses, and also provide the basic usage rules for each tense.

English Verb Tenses Explained can be a good revision tool for us.

Verb tense tutorials

For some reason, the English verb system poses a lot of trouble to English students. Textbooks keep revising them no matter what level they are, and students keep complaining about it: It's always the same story with the books: present, past, future, active, passive, and so on, they say.

Anyway, English Page has developed a great  tool for us to study and practise the English tenses. By clicking on the image below or here you will be directed to the site, and you will find two ways you can work with the English tenses. First of all you will find a lot of online activities to practise the tenses.

However, if you need to get down to the basics and study some specific aspect of the verbs, you must scroll down to the very bottom, where you will find tutorials with explanations, the uses of each tense, timelines, examples, typical mistakes and so on.