Page 236 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence
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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
I
You
He/she/it
We
They
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.
Present Simple
Past Simple
am are is are are
was were was were were