I have been extremely fortunate in my career as an EFL teacher. My first Director of Studies put up with my generally lacklustre approach to professional development, but his successor, a woman called Kasia Jakielaszek, insisted that I do something other than just teach the same lessons year in, year out.

She led me and my colleagues through the International House “Language Awareness Course,” written by Alex Tilbury and influenced by the work of Michael Lewis, among others. The course cemented in our minds some of the fundamentals of English grammar, so that we could be more conversant in terms like operator and auxiliary; but it also challenged long-held assumptions, such as that English has an exclusive future form (it doesn’t).

The LAC proved transformative, and awoke within me a desire to pursue more and more professional development. I completed several more International House courses in the years that followed, and also undertook a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Despite being a postgraduate-level course, my MA did not make demands on me in the way that Tilbury’s course did, and I missed Jakielaszek’s guidance. But more than anything else, I found that I disagreed with much of the grammar treatment that we were given to work through, and my paper that semester on the present perfect gave me one of my lowest grades. Even worse – that low grade meant that I missed out on a Distinction for the degree, having instead to settle for a hard-won Merit.

The problem, as I saw it, was that none of the course writers for the MA had been exposed to the same literature as I had. The long grammar write-up that I dragged myself through talked about the present perfect in a way that I had become familiar with in a number of coursebooks, but that I now rejected – that the present perfect illustrated an example of a completed past action with present relevance.

But that’s not really how present perfect works. The fact that this is still widely taught as the true nature of the present perfect is one reason that students whose first language does not have a perfect form struggle to understand and use the English form. If it is true that the present perfect represents a completed past action with present relevance, what if the action was not completed? What if there is no present relevance?

Another side of present perfect considers how recent the action is, and many teachers (and grammar guides) talk about this idea as being a central component of the form. But if that’s true, how does one explain this sentence: “Philosophers have searched for the meaning of existence for thousands of years.” There’s no completed action there, there’s no present relevance, and there’s certainly nothing recent about the action.

A better way to consider the present perfect is to consider the ‘present’ part of the name first. When we construct sentences with this form, we speak from the present moment. We conceptualise ourselves as being in this moment, not in the past; and from this moment we look back. As Michael Lewis would have it, the perfect form is a retrospective form.

This understanding takes care of all the issues I have discussed above. We choose to place ourselves in the present and to think about the past – that is why we use the present perfect. It doesn’t matter if the action is complete or not. It doesn’t matter if it is recent. It matters only that we want to think about that past action – nothing more.

The same logic works across other perfect forms. Past perfect is easily understood when we think of the speaker placing themselves in one past time and thinking of an earlier action.

We can also help our students to understand the difference between present perfect and past simple by stressing the importance of how we conceptualise our place in time. If we are thinking now about the past, we use present perfect. If we place ourselves in the past (perhaps through the use of a past time reference like yesterday) then we opt for past simple.

Grammar guides do not, however, spend very much time discussing the context of the sentences they use to illustrate such differences. Why is “Have you done the shopping?” given as correct and “Did you do the shopping?” given as wrong in some grammar exercises? Without knowing who is speaking to whom and why, there can be no explanation.

The Language Awareness Course that I have spoken of so highly is now buried on an IH server somewhere, and is rarely offered to teachers. That is a terrible shame. It had a massive impact on my understanding of grammar. However, given the fact that so few teachers will now be exposed to courses like that, and given the age of Michael Lewis’s “The English Verb,” I decided late last year that the time was ripe for a new publication to go over the fundamentals of English grammar.

That is why I set about writing my latest book, “English is a Simple Language.” It covers the heart of English grammar, placing context at the centre of everything, and aiming to show how grammar works to convey shades of meaning. As well as discussing the present perfect, the book also takes the ideas of Tilbury and others to produce what I think is the simplest approach to conditionals possible. Some of the ideas I present in the book are built on the work of others; some are uniquely my own (or at least so I believe…); my hope is that by putting them all together in one place, I will provide teachers and students with a condensed summary of everything they need to know to really understand English grammar.

“English is a Simple Language” is available in paperback and eBook on Amazon. More at

https://amzn.to/3TzLvSV