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‘Hi Sally! Did you eat yet?’ ‘Hey Jason. Uh, yeah. I ate already.’ In US English (at least that of the ‘Friends’ variety) the present perfect seems to be on the way out.

Interestingly, Chinese has the same ‘aspect’ ideas as English, although this is shown by adding particles and not conjugating the verb as in English. In Chinese you have a form which describes experiences “I have been to America” and another form which describes changes of state “We’ve run out of paper” and so on. This means that, unlike German learners, Chinese learners have no trouble with the concept of the perfect, they stumble on the form

a grasp of the basic concept of both progressive and perfect aspect isn’t best achieved by means of collocations, particularly adverbs and adverbial phrases. This in fact is what many coursebooks attempt to do, by strongly associating the present perfect with phrases beginning with either ‘for’ or ‘since’ (although they tend to get diverted by the different collocations within these phrases), or with ‘just/already’ or with ‘how long…?’

“Language has a fundamentally social function….. processes of language acquisition, use and change are not independent of one another but are facets of the same system…..This system is radically different from the from the static system of grammatical principles characteristic of the widely held generativist approach.” op cit p2 (Wiley Blackwell, 2008)-

that perfect aspect – albeit in a reduced and formualic way – is relatively early acquired (in L1) to express the function of ‘past event with present consequences’, and Klaus, who argues that, in L2, it is relatively late acquired, due to difficulties learners have of assigning it a function that is not already served by another form (i.e. either the past simple or the present simple)

similar examples of learners sticking to the ‘devil they know’, over-using one form at the expense of another, because the underused form is either not perceived at all (there is only a small difference between ‘I read this book’ and ‘I’ve read this book’, after all), or it is considered to be redundant – just another way of saying the same thing.

At higher levels, the link between tense choice and discourse probably is more important to focus on ( I’m thinking of your materials relating to tense choice in short news articles – the story of an escaped monkey in Uncovering Grammar).

I like the idea of looking at the present perfect as just another collocation. Let the context determine the meaning then repeat the particular collocation lots of times as in a substitution activity – then back to task – re-anchoring the language so to speak. We could even throw the description “the present perfect” out then and just approach it as another fixed expression.

In English, you have to make a decision which tense fits your intentions, and the form itself is very easy. In the beginning, you can get away by not making this decision and choosing the simplest tense.

n this second short video on the English tense and aspect system, I take  a look at perfect aspect.