[rewboss]

I prefer the compromise approach.

The problem with the traditional tense system is that students have to learn a bewildering array of, well, tenses -- anything up to 16 or even 20, depending on what a particular book defines as a "tense".

The problem with the more linguistically-correct approach is that students have to cope with several concepts at once: tense, aspect and modality. I feel there's nothing to be gained by talking about the "perfect aspect of the present tense" when "present perfect tense" is available as shorthand.

But I do try to show patterns, and explain things like this:

"You've seen the present continuous, and remember that we used the present tense of the helping verb, which is what made it 'present'; and the 'ing form', which is what made it continuous. Now, if we take the helping verb, the 'present', and change it to a past tense, what does that make? The past continuous. Now, we said that the present continuous is used to describe something happening now, so the past continuous describes something that was happening then..." ...all the while, of course, eliciting like mad, and drawing timelines with amusing cartoons to illustrate "he was having a bath when the phone rang".

Of course, it depends on the, er, course. If the students are not studying for an exam, but for a particular task, I use a different approach. "OK, now we're going to learn how to explain to a client what has already been done. We use this pattern. Grammar books call this the 'present perfect'. Later on, we'll learn how to explain to a client what we are planning to do in the future." It's task oriented: the student needs to write an e-mail to a supplier explaining that there has been some problem with the last batch, what patterns do we need to tell the story of what happened? What patterns will the supplier use to tell us how he intends to fix the problem?

Sometimes I have been known to say to students, "Now, if you want to impress your friends, you might like to know that linguists call this [insert long complicated grammatical term]."