2.1 Irregular verbs at work
As noted earlier, irregular verbs tend to be common ones, so almost any text is likely to contain at least some irregular verbs being used alongside regular ones.
Activity 5 Find the irregular verbs
Here is an extract from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1847), in which the Ghost of Christmas Present shows the miser Scrooge how different people celebrate Christmas. Read through it and highlight the single-word verbs in the past which are irregular in blue and highlight the regular past tense forms in yellow.
Comment
Of course, there are other verbs in this extract, live, labour, know, see, and present participles, such as passing, howling, singing, etc. but the aim here was to find only those verbs that were single words and in the past tense.
If you want some extra practice at spotting verbs, you can go back through this text and try to highlight all the different forms of the auxiliary verbs (be, have, do) in pink as well as finding all the other main verbs.