WHEN AND WHILE WHEN AND WHILE

Simple Past Past Progressive

irregular verbs: I spokeregular verbs: verb + ed I worked

past form of 'be' + ing form of verb  I was speaking you were speaking he / she / it was speaking we were speaking they were speaking

• We use the past continuous tense to express a long action. And we use the simple past tense to express a short action.

• If you want to express that a new action (short action) happened in the middle of an action in progress (long action), you need both tenses: Simple Past for the new action and Past Progressive for the action already in progress..

We can join the two ideas with when or while.

In the following example, we have two actions:

1. long action (watching TV), expressed with past continuous tense

I was watching TV at 8 pm.

2. short action (telephoned), expressed with simple past tense

You telephoned at 8 pm.

We can join these two actions with when or while :I was watching TV when you telephoned. you telephoned while I was watching TV

WeWe use: use:• When is used for shorter actions, and whilewhile is used for longer actions.

When is usually used with simple tenses, and while with progressive tenses.

when + short action (simple past tense)while + long action (past continuous tense)

For example, let’s look at two actions, one short and one long:

Short actionShort action – Fall down (it only takes a second to fall down)

Long action Long action – Ride a bike (bike rides can last a long time)

Because one is long and one is short, these two actions can’t happen at the same time. The short action interrupts the long action:

I was riding my bike when I fell down.

I fell down while I was riding my bike.

Let’s consider two more actions:

Reading a book Telephone ringing

It is clear that the telephone ringing is the shorter action, it only takes a few seconds:

I was reading a book whenwhen the telephone rang.

The telephone rang whilewhile I was reading a book