 5. Communicative activities to practice the past perfect continuous tense. When it comes to more complex English tenses, students often get frustrated. The following ideas will help you to organize your past perfect continuous lesson in a close to real life way to achieve better understanding for your students. 1. How long? Write several time indicators on small slips of paper, one year, three months, ten weeks, fifteen minutes and etc. The students need to draw a picture and tell what they had been doing for that length of time before any other event. For example, a student who draws one year could say I had been learning English for one year before coming to the UK. Make sure that every student gets at least one turn. 2. Reporting past speech. Divide the students into pairs. S1 makes a statement using the past continuous. S2 changes it to reported speech using the past perfect continuous. For example, S1 says, I was doing my homework. S2 says, he says he had been doing his homework. 3. Quite a change. Ask your students about their previous experiences. If your students traveled abroad their lives there were probably different. So, the students can share something they'd been doing abroad before they came back home. For example, I'd been hiking in the mountains. 4. Interview. In pairs, the students need to ask each other questions on various important events in their past. Then, they interview each other reporting what they had been doing before those events. Each person should share their partner's answer with the class. 5. The past perfect continuous crocodile. In front of the class, one student mimes a daily activity while others keep their eyes closed. On the teacher signal that student freezes in a pose and the other students open their eyes. The whole class then guesses what the volunteer had been doing before they open their eyes. Do you want to teach English abroad? Take a TEFL course.