📖 Grammar B2-1: Narrative tenses
At B1 you learned these tenses one at a time; at B2 you learn to shoot with all four at once. This material treats a past narrative as a camera kit: the past simple cuts and the story moves, the past continuous pans across whatever was already running, the past perfect dips behind the moment for a cause, and the past perfect continuous holds that dip open so the reader feels how long something had gone on. One two-line story is rebuilt four ways so the meaning shift is visible, and the central contrast — the cat ran out versus the cat had run out — shows how one word decides whether the reader watches an event or discovers it. Thirty-one multiple-choice items, a twelve-chip sorter, six corrections and a tapped newsroom extract drill the choice, and many of the items have two grammatical options where only the effect decides.
Lesson Plan
- Narrative tenses as a camera kit: cut, pan, flashback, long flashback
- Timeline showing all four positions around one past moment
- Four-row table: the shot, the tense, the sentence, what the reader feels
- The default is the cut — the other three are used for an effect
Key Vocabulary
Grammar Points
- Past simple for events that advance a narrative, in the order they happened
- Past continuous for an action already running around a past moment, including parallel backgrounds
- Past perfect for an event completed before a later past moment, supplying a cause or a discovery
- Past perfect continuous for an activity that filled the time up to a later past moment, and the traces it left
- State verbs (know, own, see, want) keep the simple forms inside a continuous scene
- for versus since with the past perfect continuous
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