How to Teach Irregular Verbs So They Actually Stick
Ask a class to conjugate "walk" and nobody thinks twice — walked, walked, done. Ask the same class to conjugate "go," "see," or "take," and the room slows down. That's not a coincidence, and it's not because those three verbs are unusual. It's because they're some of the most common words in English, and English decided, centuries ago, that the most common verbs would be the ones that break the rule. Teaching irregular verbs badly usually means teaching them like they're a spelling list. Teaching them well means treating them like what they actually are: things that have to be retrieved from memory under pressure, not derived from a pattern.
Why irregular verbs resist normal grammar teaching
Most grammar has a rule behind it, and once a student understands the rule, they can generate correct forms they've never seen before. Add "-ed" to a base verb and you get the past tense — that's a rule, and it scales. Irregular verbs don't work that way. There's no rule that turns "go" into "went" or "swim" into "swam" that a student can apply to a new verb; each form has to be stored as its own item and pulled up from memory on demand.
That's also why irregular verbs are worth the classroom time they cost. Kieran McGovern, writing for Oxford University Press's Teaching English with Oxford blog, points out that there are only around 180 irregular verbs in English — a small fraction of the many thousands of regular ones — but "they punch above their weight, making up 70% of the verbs in everyday use." A student who has genuinely internalized the top 40 or 50 irregular forms has covered a disproportionate share of the verbs they'll actually need in real conversation, which is a better return on classroom time than almost any other grammar point on the syllabus.
The method that actually works: retrieval, not explanation
Because irregular verbs can't be derived from a rule, explaining the rule doesn't help — there isn't one to explain. What works instead is repeated, low-stakes retrieval: making a student pull "went" out of memory again and again, under enough time pressure that they can't just read it off a chart, until the retrieval itself gets faster and more reliable. This is the same principle behind flashcards and vocabulary drilling, and it applies just as directly here — the students who eventually stop saying "goed" are the ones who've retrieved "went" correctly dozens of times, not the ones who've read the verb table the most.
A few things make that retrieval practice work better in an actual classroom, rather than as a solo flashcard exercise:
- Tier the verbs by frequency, not alphabetically. A verb list that goes A to Z treats "arise" and "go" as equally worth class time, and they aren't. Start with the 40–50 highest-frequency forms — go, see, take, make, come, get — before moving to trickier mid-frequency patterns, and save rare or archaic forms for advanced students who've already mastered the common set.
- Make wrong answers cost something. A student who can guess freely with no penalty will guess. A small point deduction for an incorrect form, or a "no partial credit" rule that requires both the past simple and the past participle to score, forces genuine recall instead of a 50/50 stab.
- Immediately drill any verb a student gets wrong. The moment right after a mistake is when attention is highest — write the correct three-form sequence on the board and have the class say it aloud together before moving to the next round, rather than just marking it wrong and continuing.
- Rotate who has to answer. If the same two confident students call out every answer, the rest of the class practices nothing. Round-robin or randomized turns force every student to retrieve the form under time pressure, not just the ones already comfortable doing it out loud.
CEFR-leveled irregular verb practice worth running
These are the apps in the English, no kidding lineup built around exactly this kind of retrieval practice, rather than a static worksheet:
| App | Formation | CEFR | What it's built for |
|---|---|---|---|
| irRegular Season | Teams Facing | A2–B2 | A timed conjugation race — the base form is shown, both the past simple and past participle are hidden, and wrong answers cost points. Three difficulty tiers run from the 50 most common verbs up to rare, low-frequency forms. |
| Spelling Beef | Teams Facing | A1–B2 | A spelling duel that pairs well with irregular verb practice — run it on the same verb pool right after a conjugation round to add orthographic accuracy on top of recall. |
| Sentence Lab | Whole Class | A2–B2 | Moves a verb from bare recall into context — give a class the irregular form as one of three random words and require a sentence that uses it correctly. |
| Grammar Smash | Whole Class | A1–C2 | Targets the surrounding grammar structure — perfect aspect, passive voice, reported speech — that makes a given irregular form tricky in the first place, once the form itself is no longer the bottleneck. |
All 26 apps in the lineup sit behind one account with 100 free monthly AI credits, or from €5/month for 300 credits on the pricing page — irregular verb drilling isn't gated behind a separate tier from anything else.
Five ways to run the drill so it doesn't feel like a drill
A verb-form race can get repetitive fast if it's run the same way every time. A few variations keep retrieval practice from going stale across a term:
- Verb Chain. After a correct guess, the winning student has to immediately use the past form in a sentence — the point only counts once they do. This stops the exercise from stopping at bare recall.
- Silent Round. Instead of calling out answers, each team writes theirs on a mini-whiteboard and reveals it at the same time. Useful when one or two students otherwise dominate every round.
- Three-Form Relay. Split each team into three students, one per form (base, past simple, past participle). On a signal, they stand and say their form in order — first team to complete a correct relay wins the round.
- Irregular Auction. Teams start with a fixed point total and bid on each verb before the form is revealed, weighing their confidence against the risk of a wrong, expensive guess.
- Reverse Conjugation. Show the past participle and ask for the base form instead. Reversing the usual direction breaks the habit of just pattern-matching the first two forms and forces genuine retrieval of all three.
The mistake most verb drills make
The most common failure mode isn't a bad activity — it's an unfocused one. A worksheet of 60 mixed irregular verbs, handed out with no tiering and no time pressure, lets strong students coast on the ones they already know and gives weaker students no reason to attempt the ones they don't. Verb conjugation practice works better in short, focused bursts — 15 to 20 verbs, a clear time limit, and a level of difficulty actually matched to what the class has and hasn't mastered yet — than in one long list meant to cover everything at once.
The second most common mistake is treating irregular verb forms as a one-off unit instead of ongoing maintenance. A class that drills irregular verbs hard for one week in September and never revisits them will have lost most of that gain by December. Five minutes of retrieval practice at the start of a lesson, run every week or two using whatever verbs came up in that unit's reading or listening material, holds the forms in memory far better than a single concentrated push.
Where irregular verb practice fits in a lesson
Irregular verb drilling works well as a short warm-up rather than the centerpiece of a lesson — five to ten minutes at the start, before students move into whatever speaking or writing task is actually planned for that day. It's also one of the easiest activities to run with genuinely no preparation, in the same spirit as the no-prep games most teachers keep in reserve for the days a lesson plan falls through: no photocopies, no slides, nothing to write on the board beforehand.
FAQ
How do you teach irregular verbs to ESL students? Through repeated, timed retrieval rather than rule explanation — since irregular forms can't be derived from a pattern, students need to practice pulling the correct form from memory under pressure, starting with the highest-frequency verbs before moving to rarer ones.
Why are irregular verbs so hard to teach? Because there's no underlying rule to teach. Regular verbs follow a pattern a student can apply to any new word; irregular verbs have to be memorized individually, which means practice has to focus on recall speed and accuracy rather than rule comprehension.
What's the best way to practice past simple and past participle forms together? Requiring both forms in the same round, with no partial credit for producing only one, forces students to actually know the full three-form sequence rather than guessing one form and hoping it's right.
How many irregular verbs should a class learn first? Start with the 40 to 50 highest-frequency irregular verbs — go, see, take, make, come, get, and similar everyday forms — before introducing mid-frequency or rare irregulars, since those common verbs cover a disproportionate share of everyday spoken and written English.
Written by Prof. Vito Schiuma, designer of English, no kidding.