Practise the sequence of tenses with timelines

For this post I decided to tackle a question many an English teacher has had to despair of. I know I have!

The sequence of English tenses!

Scary title, scary lesson, scary everything. At least that is what the students say. And should they have had some bad instruction at the very beginning, and you are the one to inherit them at tertiary level - well, let it suffice to say that you are going to feel all the scariness of the title, the lesson and everything.

It does not have to be like that.

Some great tools that can be used can be found at Great timeline creation web tools. Personally, I have always believed that any form of timeline is good enough. I have been using a simple arrow line with one 'now' point in the middle and respective points of time marked on it for the last 20 years.

Yet, things can be made more interesting and that is exactly what online timeline creation tools are good for.

For instance, the timeline creation tool Tiki-toki. It is very simple to use, data can be added in the form of short stories. Students can be encouraged to supply sentences of their own or the teacher can provide sentences with slots where the correct verb form should be added.

Another good resource of online timeline creators is Top 10 free timeline creation tools. A very easy one to use is definitely Read write think. It is indeed very simple to use and the final result is brilliant. The completed timeline can be saved as a Pdf document which will show the timeline and an extra page with the text inserted for each point on the timeline. Again the students may be encouraged to insert their own text or the teacher can prepare the sentences with blank lines.

Alternatively, any timeline can easily be used for the purpose of practising grammar based on traditional grammar activities other than fill-in-the blanks. What is more, the timeline can be used for almost any class or group studying English. Even students in ESP courses can practise their English by creating timelines. History students can use it to make historical timelines, literature students can use it to study the biographies of authors, law students can use them to establish the chronology of a crime, etc. Even students of electronics or some other hard science could use it to create manuals or instructions. They could explain procedures by marking the steps on the timeline.


Any timeline can be explored in various ways to serve different purposes. Bottom line is that students are introduced to a new way of studying the sequence of English tenses!