Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence 215

The verbs marked with * never change form or tense. By this I mean you

can’t add anything to the end of them. You don’t say, ‘He shoulds go’, for

example.

Others can change because they’re sometimes used as main verbs, such as to

have (has, had).

In the following sentences I’ve italicised the auxiliary verbs. They help the

main verb in bold.

✓ I have finished.

✓ They are working.

✓ Can you speak French?

Recognising regular and irregular verbs

Lots of verbs in English are irregular. They don’t follow the same patterns as

most verbs, especially in the past simple. I discuss the past simple in Chapter

16 – it’s the tense we use to say what happened yesterday, for example. Most

verbs add ‘ed’ in the past simple, such as ‘looked’ and ‘washed’. The irregular

verbs don’t change in this way, for example, ‘wore’ and ‘swam’.

Probably the most important verb and the trickiest one to explain is ‘to be’.

Fortunately, most other languages have an equivalent verb so you don’t really

have to explain its meaning but rather demonstrate how it operates in English.

It’s the verb with the most changes and exceptions – am, is, are for example.

Subject Pronoun Present Simple Past Simple

I am was

You are were

He/she/it is was

We are were

They are were

I talk about the present simple and past simple tenses in Chapter 16.

The gerund or present participle of to be is being. The past participle of to be

is been. I explain the meaning of these gerund, present and past participles in

the following section.