PAST CONTINUOUS TENSE | English grammar and exercises

Here is an English lesson about the past continuous tense. This tense is also known as the past progressive. In this video, I explain the past continuous form - the affirmative, negative and question forms. The negative form also has a contracted form. The past continuous affirmative form is made up of the subject, the past form of the verb “to be“ and then the -ing form of the main verb (also called the present participle) An example is: “I was walking“. The past continuous tense has several uses. The main use is to describe a long action that is happening around another shorter action in the past. For the shorter action, we use the past simple. An example is “I was talking to Mark when the telephone rang.“ We also use the past progressive tense to set the scene in a story, to describe 2 long actions that happen in parallel (the same time). I explain these uses and a few others with examples in this lesson. At the end of the lesson, there are a few English grammar exercises to test your understanding.