Present continuous tense ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ FORM [am/is/are + present participle] Examples: • You are watching TV. • Are you watching TV? • You are not watching TV. Complete List of Present Continuous Forms USE 1 Now Use the Present Continuous with Normal Verbs to express the idea that something is happening now, at this very moment. It can also be used to show that something is not happening now. Examples: • You are learning English now. • You are not swimming now. • Are you sleeping? • I am sitting. • I am not standing. • Is he sitting or standing? • They are reading their books. • They are not watching television. • What are you doing? • Why arent you doing your homework? USE 2 Longer Actions in Progress Now In English, now can mean: this second, today, this month, this year, this century, and so on. Sometimes, we use the Present Continuous to say that we are in the process of doing a longer action which is in progress; however, we might not be doing it at this exact second. Examples: (All of these sentences can be said while eating dinner in a restaurant.) • I am studying to become a doctor. • I am not studying to become a dentist. • I am reading the book Tom Sawyer. • I am not reading any books right now. • Are you working on any special projects at work? • Arent you teaching at the university now? USE 3 Near Future Sometimes, speakers use the Present Continuous to indicate that something will or will not happen in the near future. Examples: • I am meeting some friends after work. • I am not going to the party tonight. • Is he visiting his parents next weekend? • Isnt he coming with us tonight? USE 4 Repetition and Irritation with Always The Present Continuous with words such as always or constantly expresses the idea that something irritating or shocking often happens. Notice that the meaning is like Simple Present, but with negative emotion. Remember to put the words always or constantly between be and verb+ing. Examples: • She is always coming to class late. • He is constantly talking. I wish he would shut up. • I dont like them because they are always complaining. REMEMBER Non-Continuous Verbs/ Mixed Verbs It is important to remember that Non-Continuous Verbs cannot be used in any continuous tenses. Also, certain non-continuous meanings for Mixed Verbs cannot be used in continuous tenses. Instead of using Present Continuous with these verbs, you must use Simple Present. Examples: • She is loving this chocolate ice cream. Not Correct • She loves this chocolate ice cream. Correct ADVERB PLACEMENT The examples below show the placement for grammar adverbs such as: always, only, never, ever, still, just, etc. Examples: • You are still watching TV. • Are you still watching TV? ACTIVE / PASSIVE Examples: • Right now, Tom is writing the letter. Active • Right now, the letter is being written by Tom. Passive
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 21:41:57 +0000
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