Past Perfect Continuous ESL Worksheets, Games & Activities

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Worksheet - Grammar and Writing Exercises: Gap-fill, Changing Word Forms, Matching, Writing Sentences, Guessing In this comprehensive past perfect continuous worksheet, students practice using the past perfect continuous to communicate cause and effect in past situations. First, students complete sentences with the past perfect continuous form of the verbs in brackets. Next, students match situations to their probable causes using 'because' to connect the results on the left to their causes on the right. After that, students answer questions with their own ideas using the negative form of the past perfect continuous. Students then choose three results and write a because-clause for each one explaining the cause using the past perfect continuous. Finally, students swap papers with a partner, read their partner's causes, and guess which results their partner's clauses belong to. show less

ESL Past Simple and Past Perfect Continuous Game - Grammar and Speaking: Matching, Forming Sentences from Prompts - Group Work In this free past perfect continuous game, students combine sentence beginnings and endings to explain past results using the past perfect continuous. In groups, players take turns picking up a beginning card, reading the first half of the sentence aloud and placing it face up on the table for everyone to see. All the players then race to find a matching ending from the cards on the table. The first player to find the correct ending picks it up and reads it out, putting the verb in brackets in the past perfect continuous form. If the other players agree that the ending matches and is grammatically correct, the player writes the past perfect continuous form of the verb on the ending card and keeps the two cards. If not, the player is out of the round and the other players continue looking for the correct ending. The player with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Worksheet - Grammar and Reading Exercises: Gap-fill, Error Correction, Writing Sentences from Prompts, Reading Comprehension Questions In this productive past perfect continuous worksheet, students practice talking about ongoing past actions and their effects. First, students complete sentences with verbs in brackets in their past perfect continuous form. Next, students correct mistakes in past perfect continuous sentences and questions. Students then complete a short story with verbs from a box in their past perfect continuous form. Finally, students answer reading comprehension questions about the story using the past perfect continuous. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Worksheet - Grammar Exercises: Matching, Identifying, Gap-fill, Sentence Completion In this useful past perfect continuous worksheet, practice forming and identifying the past perfect continuous and contrasting it with the past simple. Students begin by matching past perfect continuous sentence halves together. Students then identify past perfect continuous clauses, past simple clauses, affirmative and negative sentences, and questions from the first exercise. Next, students complete sentences with past simple and past perfect continuous verb forms from a box. Finally, students use the past perfect continuous to complete sentences with explanations. show less

ESL Past Simple and Past Perfect Continuous Game - Grammar and Speaking: Matching, Forming Sentences from Prompts, Freer Practice - Group Work In this free past perfect continuous game, students match past perfect continuous and past simple sentence halves using 'when' to make logical sentences. In groups, students take turns turning over one past perfect continuous card and one past simple card from each set. If a student can match the two sentence halves with 'when' to make a logical sentence, the student keeps the two cards and scores a point. If a logical sentence cannot be made, the student turns the cards back over. The student with the most points at the end of the game is the winner. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Activity - Grammar: Running Dictation, Gap-fill, Changing Word Forms - Pair Work In this creative past perfect continuous activity, students complete a running dictation about a mysterious death and then use clues to write relative clause sentences describing what the victim had been doing. In pairs, one student is the writer and the other is the reader. The reader runs to the text, reads the first sentence or two, runs back and dictates it to their partner, who writes it down. This continues until the text has been fully dictated. When the students have finished, the readers sit with their writing partner to check their text, making any necessary corrections. Students then complete sentences about the circumstances surrounding the death using details from a box along with the words provided, putting the verbs in the past perfect continuous form. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous vs. Past Continuous Worksheet - Grammar Exercises: Binary Choice, Sentence Completion, Ordering, Writing Questions from Prompts In this past perfect continuous vs. past continuous worksheet, students learn how the two tenses differ when describing ongoing actions in the past. Students start by identifying the correct past tense in sentences. Next, students complete sentences with their own ideas in the past perfect continuous or past continuous. After that, students put lines of a story in the correct order by numbering sentences 1 to 12. Lastly, students write past perfect continuous or past continuous questions that correspond to a set of answers. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Worksheet - Grammar Exercises: Unscrambling, Sentence Completion, Gap-fill, Comprehension Questions, Writing a Paragraph In this past perfect continuous worksheet, students review the past perfect continuous tense and how it is used with the past simple. To begin, students put words in order to make past perfect continuous sentences about different people. Next, students use their own ideas to complete sentences with a past perfect continuous clause, e.g. 'Before Grace got her first job, she had been volunteering in a hospital.' After that, students complete a story about someone's greatest achievement with verbs in brackets in their past simple or past perfect continuous forms. Students then move on to use the past perfect continuous to answer comprehension questions about the story. Finally, students write about one of their greatest achievements using the past perfect continuous and past simple. show less

ESL Past Perfect Continuous Game - Grammar and Speaking: Forming Sentences from Prompts, Controlled Practice - Group Work In this engaging past perfect continuous game, students listen to sentences and race to change them into past perfect continuous sentences with time conjunctions. In groups, students take turns picking up a card from the top of the pile and reading out the two sentences at the top of the card along with the time conjunction shown in brackets, e.g. 'I drove for 14 hours before reaching my destination. (by the time)' The other students listen and race to create a past perfect continuous sentence using the time conjunction. The first student to say the correct sentence written at the bottom of the card in bold or a similarly grammatically correct sentence wins and keeps the card, e.g. 'I had been driving for 14 hours by the time I reached my destination.' The student with the most cards at the end of the game wins. show less

ESL Past Simple vs. Past Perfect Continuous Activity - Grammar and Writing: Writing Sentence Halves from Prompts, Freer Practice - Group Work In this fun past simple and past perfect continuous activity, students collaboratively build short stories by alternating past perfect continuous and past simple sentence halves on cards that they pass around the group. First, students read the past perfect continuous sentence half at the top of their card, e.g. 'They had been riding camels through the desert for half a day...' Students then write a past simple sentence half underneath to continue the sentence, e.g. '...when they saw an ice cream shop.' Next, students fold their card so that only the sentence half they wrote appears and pass it to the person on their right, who writes a past perfect continuous sentence half, e.g. 'They had been looking for one for an hour...' This process is repeated with students writing past perfect continuous and past simple sentence halves alternately until the card is complete. Students then unfold their cards and take turns reading their short stories to the group. Finally, each group chooses the best or most amusing story and reads it to the class. show less