Lesson 37

What are you doing?

Lesson contents:

- Present progressive grammar
- Basic forms (infinitives) and
   present continuous forms

Always watch the video without subtitles first in order to train your ears! It's a good idea to watch several times until you feel the "music", before watching the version with subtitles. Your pronunciation will be much better if you follow this rule.

Exercises for this lesson:

• Grammatical summary & 2 questions (1)
• Put in - look - clean - put into (2)
• Listening comprehension: choose the verbs you hear in the video (3)
• Choose the basic form of each verb (4)
• Type a complete sentence for each picture (5)
• Right now, I'm talking to you (6)
• Watch and choose (7)
• Watch and type (8)
• What's John doing? (9)

How to do the lessons:

1. Watch the video without subtitles.
2. Do all the Exercises.
3. Come back to this page.
4. Watch the video with English Subtitles. Use the Pause button. People speak fast!

Problems? See general support, recording support or ask your question here.

What are you doing?
Watch this video, then click on Exercise 1

Same video with Precise Subtitles
Do the exercises before watching this video with subtitles.

Real English®

Teachers:

This is the classic clip and lesson on the Present Continuous (or "Present Progressive", if you prefer), providing extensive practice for beginners and pre-intermediate students. The most basic use of this tense becomes self-evident as we see people telling us what they are doing while they do it.

Exercise 6 in this lesson reminds us of this most basic use, and seems ironic in context. Exercises 7 and 8 use a completely different video from the main one. No one talks. We simply see people doing things. Exercise 7 is an MC quiz while exercise 8 is good for writing practice in the classroom.

In upcoming lessons we will see how the same verb tense is used:
- to describe longer actions in progress, for example, "He is studying to become a doctor".
- for actions in the near future. For example, "She is meeting her boyfriend in a bar tonight". This is the same as "She is going to meet her boyfriend in a bar tonight".
- for actions which are repeated, with adverbs like "always" or "constantly". For example, "I don't like those people because they are always making trouble".