I’m delighted to announce that my latest English learning book is almost ready for release. This is my first exercise book, building on the success of the exercises on this website and the lessons provided in The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide. And it’s been a long time coming – I had planned to release an accompanying exercise book ever since The English Tenses was released 5 years ago, but perhaps the 5-year anniversary is an apt time to finally complete it!

The origins of The English Tenses Exercise Book

I first wrote The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide with to focus narrowly on a fundamental area of grammar that many students find tricky to master. The tenses are the backbone of English, structuring how relate events, but as there are many of them and their uses often overlap, perfecting their use takes a nuanced understanding and a lot of practice.

My first grammar book set out to make that nuanced understanding accessible. At the time, I hoped to follow it with an exercise book to offer a lot of practice on a single topic.

To start with, sales of The English Tenses weren’t strong enough to justify working on the exercises book. But over the years, with improved marketing, the ELB books have reached enough people to warrant returning to my original plan – and I’m happy to say the exercise book is finally a reality.

What to expect from The English Tenses Exercise Book

The purpose of the exercise book is to drill (1) your ability to form the 12 key tenses and (2) your understanding of when to use each tense. It does this primarily through “cloze” exercises, where thousands of examples are offered with the verb forms incomplete. Your task is to apply the correct tense. These examples vary from individual sentences to long-form prose, including short narratives, schedules and dialogues.

As well as cloze exercises, the book includes a selection of conversion, matching, ordering and ‘spot the mistake’ exercises. Each tense form is drilled, then the uses, with many mixed tenses exercises combining and comparing them.

In total, there are 160 exercises for you to complete, each with between 10 and 20 questions (or up to 40 in the longer-form exercises) – as a complement to more generalist grammar guides where only a couple of exercises are offered per topic. My hope is that through doing this monstrous amount of work readers will really cement their knowledge of the tenses (perhaps even just by reading all the examples!).

The book is with my editor now, and will be rigorously tested before its release. I’m currently aiming to release it on December 10th, just in time for Christmas – in both eBook and paperback form. In the meantime, brush up on your tenses knowledge with the grammar guide so you’re ready for the exercises to come!