Narrative Tenses

When you describe a sequence of events you need to use several different verb tenses if you
want to make the exact chronology perfectly clear. In order to do this effectively, you will
need to identify three different things:
• a main event.
• a background event (a secondary event happening at the same time as the main event).
• an event which happened before the other events.

We will use three verb tenses to help express this type

of chronology: The past simple, the past progressive
(or continuous) and the past perfect. The past simple
will be used to express the “main event”, the past
progressive will express the “background event” and
the past perfect will express the “event which
happened before the other events”.

Try to do the exercise on the left hand side of the

page then check your answer below.

The correct answers are: a3, b1, c2

a. When Carol arrived home, Mark had finished

making dinner (it was ready and sitting on the table).

(Mark made dinner before Carol arrived home. The

two actions happened at different times.)

b. When Carol arrived home, Mark took out the

things he needed to make dinner and started preparing
the meal.

(Carol arriving home and Mark making dinner

happened at the same time).

c. When Carol arrived home, Mark had started

making dinner but he hadn’t yet finished.

(The action of cooking the dinner was still in progress

when Carol arrived home. ‘Mark was making
dinner’ describes what was happening in the kitchen
both before and after Carol arrived.)
Source: Headway Intermediate, 0UP.

CH – Narrative tenses 1/2

When do I use each tense?

1. Past simple. The past simple is often used to describe finished periods of time in the past
(for example, yesterday, last week, in June 1995, last quarter).

Form = (regular verbs) + ed (or + d if the verb already ends with an ‘e’)
(Irregular verbs) = learn the form for each verb

e.g. Last week the market fell.

Gas prices rose in 2009.
Signs of recovery appeared across Europe last autumn.

Revise the irregular verbs from your course notes on Skill 3 before the exam.

2. Past perfect: The main use of the past perfect is to indicate an ‘earlier’ past. We can say
that we ‘go back’ in time even further than an event in the past simple. The past perfect is
used to refer to an action in the past that was completed before another action in the past.

Form = had + past participle

e.g. She told me that she had bought Apple stocks.

He had worked for the company for twenty years, then they made him redundant.

3. Past progressive: The past progressive is used to explain that something was happening
(in progress) at a particular moment in past time. We can use it to describe the
background to other events.

Form = was/were + -ing form of verb

e.g. What were you doing when the when I called?

He was working for EDF in 1989.
She was thinking about the problem when the phone rang.

The following diagram might help you to visualize how the sequence of events would unfold
if we drew them on a timeline.

Past perfect Past simple

Past progressive (can continue before and after the main event)

CH – Narrative tenses 2/2