🔄 Grammar B1-21: Present perfect continuous

The material that opens the B1.2 half of the Fleydo grammar series, and the first tense at this level whose whole meaning is a point of view. The opening scene is Sadie’s kitchen at noon: flour on every surface, her brother Leon dusted white to the elbows, and not one finished cake — Leon has been baking all morning, a sentence that counts no cakes and promises none, because it points at the activity, the hours and the mess. The form is taught as three parts of which only the first ever changes — have or has, then been, then the -ing verb — with a full table of statements, negatives, questions and short answers, the ’s-means-has contraction, and How long have you been…?, the question the tense was built for, answered with the for and since machinery carried over whole from B1-1. A four-question decision procedure — activity or state? does the stretch touch now? doing or done? is there a number? — runs through two worked examples, including the just-stopped activity betrayed by its traces: why is there flour on the cat? The compare-and-verdict pair is the heart of the material — I’ve read your book against I’ve been reading your book, a result to hand back against a way the evenings have been spent — and eight items drill that line alone, evidence against counts, How long against How many. A 111-word tap-and-explain monologue from Sadie mixes fourteen continuous forms, scores and pieces of evidence. Practice runs to thirty-two explained multiple-choice items in four sets, plus twelve clues to sort into score and doing boxes, six real learner errors to repair, and three traps: state verbs refusing -ing, a number switching the tense to the simple, and the present tense leaking under a for-phrase. Teacher notes give a 45-minute sequence, the DOING/DONE board, the how-many rescue test, the evidence mime game, and Cambridge B1 Preliminary relevance.