A handout on the Present Perfect tense

Please note: My objective here is not to be nasty. Comments here; Objective at the end:

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* You use the present perfect (not the past simple) when talking about general experiences.

Patient: Doctor! Doctor! Every time I sneeze, I get an erection!

Doctor: What are you taking for it?

Patient: Black pepper...

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* Peter has been to Tanzania. (He went to Tanzania and now he's back.)

[conversation about Tanzania leads to...]
A: Hey, I hear Peter's been to Tanzania.
B: He has. He has. Have you?
A: No, I haven't. Say, where IS Peter thesedays? I haven't seen him in a while...
B: Um... Italy the last I heard. Working at some conversation school there for rich mobsters' wives...

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* You use the present perfect (not the past simple) to talk about recent past events

A: Excuse me... Is John here?
B: Yeah, he's... Oh! He WAS here... I saw him just a minute ago!

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* You use the present perfect (not the past simple or the present simple) to talk about an action that began in the past but is still going on now.

I live in Japan. I came here a couple of years ago.

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As I said at the outset, my intention here is not to be nasty to the author of this article. Rather, my purpose is to demonstrate that these tired old "rules of usage" for the Present Perfect are completely incorrect.

Well, more to the point, they are--as with most of the problems I find concerning grammar teaching--half-truths designed to supposedly HELP students by "keeping it simple" but which go on to cause more damage than the short-term band-aid solution they (apparently) provide--for the TEACHER mostly!

The Perfect Aspect is not difficult to understand. It only has ONE function in English (which is the subject of another series of articles and not a blog comment! :-) ).

Neither is it exceedingly difficult for learners of English if dealt with correctly. Now, is that the same as "easy"? No, of course not! This concept (i.e. perfect aspect) simply doesn't exist in many languages. And the ones in which it does often use it slightly differently, making mapping from L1 to L2 problematic. But it's not as stupendously difficult as everyone always makes it out to be.

The problem as far as I'm concerned is in the same old half-truths being rehashed again and again and again by each new generation of EFL teachers (who then "graduate" to being textbook writers) without them critically examining the tosh our textbooks are telling us.

So, although I'm not going out of my way to be horrible to the author of this article, I'm far less generous in my assessment than the first commenter.

Leslie