Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Zoobot]

I've always taken this for granted. I'm having trouble articulating the situations that call for the Present Perfect. Any help would be appreciated.

[Ya-ta Boy]

I just googled 'grammar present perfect' and a bunch of links showed up. Here is one:

http://www.eclecticenglish.com/grammar/PresentPerfect1A.html

It includes a bunch of examples for students to do.

[PRagic]

I take back what I said on another thread about hiring English Lit. majors. Yikes!

[rothkowitz]

An action is over but you still "feel" it.Its still palpable.

eg The car has crashed.

[Zoobot]

rothkowitz: that sounds like a useful approach. Sometimes I have
bells going off in my head when I say something because I immediately think of an example that contradicts what I just said. Explaining this to the students is counter-productive many times though. Alas, it's necessary to simplify before you can gain a working knowledge of a language.

Some uses of the present perfect imply a continuation into the future.

i.e. "My father has gone to church on Christmas day for the last thirty years"

The implication here is that he will continue to go to church on Christmas.

One of the things I'm noticing about Hakwon education is that proficiency with grammar exercises does not translate into accuracy with language generation. Many kids who can perform perfectly on grammar exercises still use the wrong tenses when they write journal entries or writing assignments. I don't think many native teachers (myself included) are very good at explaining when to use each tense.

This thread is an attempt to start a substantive discussion about improving these explanations through actively thinking through verb tenses, google links notwithstanding.

[Dan The Chainsawman]

Sock puppets

[lover.asian]

[Zoobot]

I see teachers are just as unwilling to think as students...

[Missile Command Kid]

General rule of thumb: events described in the present perfect occurred sometime before now, but with no specific time/date/day in mind. Events can be continuous.

For instance:

I have been to Paris three times in the past year. (Specific: I went to Paris in March, April, and June.)
The pipe has been leaking for months. (Specific: The pipe started leaking in March.)
I have eaten turkey this year. (Specific: I ate turkey for Christmas.)

Exception: specific dates can be used to describe continuous actions in the present perfect so long as you use "since."

I have been eating pork since three o'clock yesterday.

[Woland]

As Dave Willis has said, the distinction between the present perfect and the simple past is so subtle and complex as to be unteachable. This is in part because the distinction is not rule determined, but represents choices in how we wish to portray events. That is, in many situations, both forms are grammatical, but they represent different perspectives on an action (the distinction between perfect and simple being a difference in aspect, not tense).

For example, consider the following context: You are in the house you moved into a few months previously. The doorbell rings and when you answer, a stranger is there who asks for the previous owners. Do you answer: "They moved." or "They've moved."? Both are grammatical and contextually appropriate. What is the difference in meaning between them?

In longer stretches of discourse, it has been found that the two forms alternate, with the present perfect serving as a frame indicating background information establishing a discourse topic, while the past simple indicates foregrounded information within that frame. (A similar relationship holds for the going to/will, used to/would, and past perfect/past simple alternations.) A good genre example of this is obituaries. Notice how obituaries almost always begin with sentences in the present perfect - 'X has died'. This sentence provides a frame marking the discourse. Following it, the details of the deceased's life continue in the past simple, foregrounded against the background frame provided by the present perfect.

How are you going to teach this kind of thing to students? You aren't, at least not in any rule-based way. Attempts to teach students rules for making sentences in the present perfect will result in students who can produce the form in isolated sentences, but who cannot use it appropriately in discourse. To really teach the use of the present perfect in relation to other verb forms requires us to present students with lots of text involving these forms and helping them work out the choices that are available in the texts and how the producers of these texts made their choices and what they mean. Doing this will hopefully move them towards more accurate choices, while helping them see that grammar isn't about rules being piled up, but about making choices in real contexts.

Sorry not to give a simple answer, but it's not a simple question. And I think we are dishonest when we try to pretend that things as complex as discourse and the English tense/aspect system can be reduced to simple rules. And when we are dishonest with our students, we end up teaching them not English, but something which merely resembles English.

If you want more details on how you might expose your students to text and discourse involving the present perfect in ways that get them to attend to what it does, take a look at Willis' book, Rules, Patterns, and Words, from Cambridge University Press.

[Hotpants]

My short explanation to students is that present perfect is used to talk about 1) experiences (can add time periods with 'for' and 'since' but not fixed dates/times) and 2) events that have happened in the (recent) past which may or may not be entirely finished.

I think you need to do a separate activity to explain the experience part, and then a separate activity to show how it's used as another past tense.

Grammar in Use by Murphy has lots of sentence examples that the students can fill in.

[Universalis]

Another good point to make, I think, is that we often use the presetn perfect to kick-off a topic, and then switch to the simple past to further elaborate. FOr example:

Have you eaten Korean food?

Yes.

Was it good?

Was it too spicy?

Where did you go?

What did you eat?

Did you try poshingtang?

And so on...

The initial question asks about a lifetime experience (known as the experiential perfect). Once it is answered in the affirmative, the questioneer can move on to more specific questions that are firmly anchored in the past (the simple past).

It's a tricky distinction to teach, but I think it can be done. But it is important to make clear that there are cases where either would be OK.

Brian

[ddeubel]

I agree with all that have mentioned the notion of "subtlety" but I still say it is teachable in the sense that anything is teachable but it is the student ultimately through practice that will make it "learnable".

I do think that one of the first skills any EFL/ESL teacher needs is to be able to draw a time line, with loops and labels, indicating all the tenses. I can draw one in seconds and it sketchily gives students a visual view of the tenses (without the subtlety:)). If I can find one on line, I'll post here...

DD

[PRagic]

You can also ask them, "When do you use this tense when speaking Korean?" How about THEY do some thinking? I always liked it when my teacher challenged the class, and the lessons stuck. Once they can formulate an answer, then you can talk about it and make comparisons and contrasts.

[freewill]