Have you had your coffee yet? Are you sure? When did you have it? This week at LanguageLab we focused on practicing and using
the simple past and the present perfect.
Understanding when to use these two tenses is difficult for many students of English.
The rule of thumb is that the simple past is used to
talk about actions completed in the past at a fixed time, while the present perfect is used to talk about actions that were completed
in the past but still affect the present.
That sounds good in theory, but what does it mean in practice? In this class I used photos that showed a day in my life to demonstrate
some of the differences between the two tenses.
For our first activity we put the photos in order so that they showed my day
from start to end. This gave us the opportunity to practice describing events using the simple past. After this we used the
photos to show how the present perfect is used when an action is connected to an event that occurred in the past.
For example, we looked at a photo of me standing in my hotel room after checking in.
We decided that using the present simple, the caption under
the photo would be, “She has checked in.”
To practice using the present simple and the present perfect click here.
