This book is intended to help you, as a teacher of English as a Foreign language (E F L ), to teach common verb tenses and patterns more efficiently and clearly. Some of the material in the book may surprise you. To begin with the explanations and commentary may seem self-evident, or the phonetic realisations may seem unnecessary. If this is so, please try to bear with me. The material in the book is designed to be of help to several groups: the experienced native speaker seeking a possible new approach to add to his armoury, the novice teacher, who speaks English with native speaker intuition, but has not yet fully analysed what it is that he does know, or why he says what he says, and also the non-native EFL teacher abroad, who speaks English excellently, and yet wishes to understand the subtler differences in usage and idiom which the native speaker takes for granted.