Simple Past Tense and Past Progressive Tense in English - ESL - EFL

Simple Past Tense and Past Progressive Tense in English - ESL - EFL - TESL - TEFL - TESOL

The simple past tense and the past progressive tense are used to talk about situations or events that happened in the past. 

To represent time in a more pictorial fashion, I have created a visual of time here:

This visual will be used as my base picture for all explanations of verb tenses in English.


Simple past = a situation or event that began and ended at a specific time in the past.

Form: Subject + verb (past tense)

(The verbs in past tense are in bold.)

Examples: 

I ate pizza yesterday. 

You drank all the milk this morning.

He saw the movie last week. 

She climbed the mountain.

We went to the grocery store. 

They drove to Florida last year.

You can also use a when-clause with the simple past. If you use a when-clause with the past, the when-clause action/event  happens before the other event. 

The when-clauses are in [brackets.]

Examples:

[When I got home,] I went to bed.

I hit the ball [when he pitched it to me.]

[When I drove to the store,] they didn't have any milk.

She ate all of her dinner [when her father asked her.]

Past Progressive = a situation or event that happened for a duration in the past.

Form : Subject + was/were + verb(+ing) 

(The verbs in the past progressive tense are in bold.)

Examples:

I was not listening to you yesterday. 

You were speaking English three minutes ago. 

At 2 pm yesterday, he was playing soccer on Field 3. 

She was smoking a cigarette last weekend.

We were eating for four hours yesterday.

They were stealing music from the internet last week.

You can also use the past progressive to talk about two actions that were happening at the same time. 

Examples:

While I was eating dinner, my roommate was baking a cake. 

My best friend was studying for her test while I was reading a book.

They were dining at the restaurant while we were bowling.

You were doing your homework when I was talking to my mom.

Lastly, you can use the past simple with the past progressive to talk about an actions that happens for a duration in the past while another actions happens in the middle of it. 

(The actions highlighted in blue happened in the middle of the action highlighted in red.) 

Examples:

You were studying for your test when I came home. 

She was standing outside when it began to rain.

When I got home, my roommate was eating her dinner.

They were running in the park when they saw a beautiful woman.

This is simply a review of the tenses. More practice with these examples will be on another post. So keep looking and keep learning! :)

*I did create all of the pictures from scratch for this post.