During a recent English Tenses class of mine, students found it diffcult to understand how one of the functions of the Present Perfect Simple Tense was to describe an unfinished past duration. The sentence was ‘He has worked here for 10 years.’ Students couldn’t understand how it was an unfinished action, as they believed the subject had previously worked there for 10 years and was no longer at the same workplace.

Sometimes an explanation just isn’t enough and students will be left scratching their heads with certain concepts. The Present Perfect Simple Tense is particularly tricky in India since it cannot be directly translated into several Indian languages as the ‘perfect’ aspect in English grammar is non-existent in many Indian languages.

Thankfully, timelines are here to make your life easier and, today, we’re going to highlight why you should use timelines, while teaching English Tenses

1. Visual Aid:

By laying all the events of a sentence in a neat timeline, students will have a better idea of the situations and conditions in a sentence and their relation to The use of visual aids is beneficial, as lower-level students may find the linguistic explanations confusing, when studying English tenses. Below is a timeline laying out the events of the above-mentioned sentence.

2. Focus on Verb Form:

Students can more clearly understand how a change in the form of the verb can denote an action either completed or in progress in the past, present, or future by referencing the events depicted in the Looking at the timeline above, students were immediately able to clear their misconception and realise that the employee was still at his current work place by focussing on the time markers and the verb ‘has’, denoting the duration of an unfinished past action.

3. Checking Concepts:

Using CCQs (Concept Checking Questions), in tandem with timelines, can further reinforce the concepts of English tenses and allow clarification of doubts and misconceptions of students. CCQs are vital as they cover every aspect of a language item and, thus, lead to a more thorough and well-constructed lesson. Listed below are some CCQs that would apply to the sentence.

• Do we know when the action started? (Yes)

• Does the action continue up to and include the present? (Yes)

• Does he still work here? (Yes)

• What are we interested in? (The duration of the action)

Adding timelines into your teaching repertoire will certainly make your English Tenses lessons easier for both the students and yourself. While no technique is fool-proof, timelines are certainly the most effcient and productive way of teaching English Tenses currently. Various online and written materials are available on timelines and CCQs, which will help you get a handle on timelines, if you’ve never used them previously. Try them out for yourself and let us know how they work out for you!