Present Continuous – English Grammar Profiler

Here are some student writing examples of present continuous highlighted with details:

I am typing English words right now.

PELIC Chinese female level 2 writing class

However, we also can interpret from the graph that we aren’t preparing for it yet. 

PELIC Korean female level 3 writing class

I am always falling over one of his toy cars or trucks.

PELIC Arabic male level 3 writing class

There are at least 30 points to do with the present continuous in the English Grammar Profile.  Half of those are easily distinguished formally, but many others are not.  The usage aspect is too difficult to search for as it requires large amounts of manual interpretation.  Still, we have decided at English Grammar Pro to define ‘increasing range’ as A2 and B1 verbs, and ‘wide range’ as B2+ and academic verbs.  We won’t look for examples of every point on this page because most of these points are already covered elsewhere.

Point 46 in the category of FUTURE at B2 is defined as:

present continuous with a wide range of verbs to talk about future arrangements.

Point 35 at B1 is the same except:

 increasing range of verbs to talk about future arrangements.

A2 point 13

a limited range of verbs to talk about future arrangements.

A2 point 5 in NEGATION  is defined:

negative statements of main verbs in the present continuous and present perfect with ‘be’ and ‘have’ + ‘not/n’t’.

A2 point 8 in the category of PRESENT continuous:

limited range of verbs – about temporary situations.

A2 point 13

increasing range of verbs to talk about situations and events in progress

A2 point 17

limited range of adverbs of indefinite frequency, often to talk about surprising or undesirable situations or events

A2 point 18

‘wh-‘ questions, especially in the context of letters and emails.

A1 point 3 in the category of  VERBS:

the auxiliary verb ‘be’. present continuous

When we inspected the most frequent (top one hundred) verbs in the ‘BE + Verbing’ phrase that are A2 and above, they don’t seem to obviously suggest future arrangements.  Therefore, if we really want to find arrangements we must search for something like future time markers and possibly superficially.  For example: ‘tomorrow’.

_vb* _v?g* tomorrow

Lemmas:

B1  drop

  UNILAD Kid Cudi has announced he’s dropping a new track with Eminem tomorrow, and it’s the collaboration we didn’t know we needed.   The Verge Instagram is launching a new shopping page that‘ll highlight brands and collections.   KIIS1065 Rihanna Is Releasing Fenty Skin Care Range REALLY SOON!

These are the 100 most frequent Lemmas found with _vb* _v?g* on iWeb corpus. Not all of them are present continuous, because ‘BE’ can introduce non-finitive -ING clauses/gerunds.

Now when we put them through text inspector we can get some general level of range for them.

A2 25.00%

add, become, bring, build, call, follow, grow, happen, hold, hope, keep, lose, move, offer, plan, prepare, push, receive, sell, serve, share, spend, stand, try, turn

B1 13%

act, consider, create, develop, expect, experience, fight, lead, operate, perform, provide, search, wonder

B2 6.00%

cause, deal, host, seek, struggle, suffer

*Note that vocabulary has many senses:

If you are referring to me, 

I request that you speak more clearly in the Queen‘s English.

The Cannon Ball Run

Someone searched for:

I am + verb-ING

and I think this page is the one they were looking for.