Our latest free ESL Lesson Plan is one of the most popular grammar topics for ESL teachers: how to teach the Future Continuous tense. Using the Present Continuous as a starting point, this lesson plan will help pre-intermediate students construct sentences such as “I’ll be eating at home.” In addition, students will practice using the Future Continuous with expressions of time.

When should you teach the Future Continuous to ESL students?

It’s important to teach this topic at the right time. If you start teaching the Future Continuous too early, students can feel overwhelmed or demotivated. This lesson is designed for pre-intermediate students (B1 Level on the CEFR framework). Before you start this lesson, check the following:

• Can your students use the present continuous for actions in progress at the time of speaking?
• Can your students use the simple future with will?
• Have your students had exposure to the past continuous, for actions in progress at a point in the past?

If your students have done all of the above three points, then they are ready to learn the Future Continuous.

What is the Future Continuous?

To help your students identify the Future Continuous, they will be asked to look at a timeline and compare the following sentences:

• Sally is preparing her swimming gear now.
• Sally will start her training session at noon.
• At 12:30 pm, she will be swimming.

The final sentence is in the Future Continuous. This tense is used to describe an event that will be in progress at a specific time in the future. In this case, the action is “swimming” and the specific time in the future is “12:30 pm”. Importantly, this lesson will focus on talking about events that are already underway in the future.

How do you teach the Future Continuous?

Firstly, using a visual timeline is an effective way to help students visualize the Future Continuous tense. Then, like all Off2Class lessons, this lesson plan prompts the student to talk about themselves. The teacher notes will encourage you to ask them about their plans at specific points in the future: perhaps later today, this weekend or next year.

Once the student is comfortable with the basic sentence structure, you can introduce other ways that we use this tense. For example, one interesting use of the Future Continuous is to predict events in the future. This might be a new concept for students, and you may need to re-visit this in the next lesson.

What Comes Next?

We know teaching the English language to new learners can be tricky. Therefore, we offer a wide selection of resources, training and content to help you succeed. Our Youtube channel is packed with useful tutorials!

Remember, if you want additional lesson plans and support, including teachers’ notes, be sure to sign-up for a free Off2Class account.

Let us know what lesson plans you would like to see in the future!