Best ESL Grammar Worksheets for Intermediate Learners in 2025

Intermediate ESL students often reach a plateau: they understand the basics, yet accuracy and complexity lag behind ambition. A targeted worksheet can be the nudge that helps them internalize tricky grammar and transfer it into real conversations. The right resources save planning time, keep lessons purposeful, and give learners confidence with structures they find intimidating.

This guide highlights the grammar areas where B1-B2 students stumble most, shows you how to evaluate worksheets for depth and relevance, and shares ready-to-use ideas you can plug into your next lesson. Use it as a checklist when building your classroom or digital library.

Why Intermediate Learners Need Targeted Grammar Practice

A solid worksheet should push students beyond controlled drills and into meaningful use. Focus on recurring trouble spots that block progress:

• Perfect tenses: Clarify timelines and contrast life experience with finished actions.
• Conditionals: Reinforce second and third conditionals so learners can speculate and reflect.
• Passive voice: Help students report news, processes, and formal information accurately.
• Reported speech: Support storytelling, meeting summaries, and exam tasks.
• Phrasal verbs and idioms: Build natural fluency and listening comprehension.

How to Evaluate Intermediate Grammar Worksheets

When you review a worksheet, look for signals that it goes deeper than gap fills. Keep these benchmarks in mind:

• Specific focus: Each worksheet should tackle one grammar objective so learners can master it quickly.
• Contextual language: Example sentences and dialogs need to mirror authentic usage.
• Balanced challenge: Activities should stretch students without overwhelming them.
• Varied tasks: Mix recognition (identify), manipulation (transform), and production (create) activities.

"Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason." — Richard Chenevix Trench

Top Worksheet Picks for Intermediate Classes

1. Perfect tense timelines: Visual timelines with guided questions that clarify time relationships.
2. Conditional sentence matching: Mix-and-match cards or drag-and-drop tasks that highlight cause and effect.
3. Passive voice transformations: Scaffolded exercises that shift sentences from active to passive within a storyline.
4. Reported speech dialogues: Role-play scripts where students convert real conversations into reported summaries.
5. Phrasal verb stories: Reading passages rich in phrasal verbs followed by categorizing and personalized production tasks.

Integrate Worksheets into Communicative Lessons

Worksheets deliver the structure; your follow-up activities deliver the fluency. Pair each worksheet with communicative work that compels students to use the target grammar:

• Role-play debriefs: After completing reported speech tasks, ask groups to report another pair's conversation.
• Grammar challenges: Turn transformations into games where teams race to rewrite sentences accurately.
• Project extensions: Have learners build mini presentations or infographics that reuse language from the worksheet.

Track Improvement with Intentional Feedback

Gather evidence of progress and adjust instruction quickly by combining worksheets with simple tracking routines:

• Quick reviews: Collect one key error per student and open the next lesson with a targeted recap.
• Observation notes: Listen during pair work and jot down successful usage to highlight later.
• Regular assessment: Schedule short exit tickets or quizzes so students see measurable growth.

Video: Designing Challenging ESL Grammar Worksheets

Quick Wins for Your Next Class

• Select one worksheet from the list above and map a five-minute communicative follow-up.
• Create a simple rubric to record progress on accuracy, fluency, and range each time you use a worksheet.
• Rotate worksheet formats weekly so students experience visuals, problem solving, and storytelling.

Related Resources

• Complete Guide to Teaching ESL Grammar
• ESL Brains Grammar Exercises Review
• Ultimate ESL Vocabulary Building Handbook