Abakan, Russia TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

Honestly, I am a native speaker of English and had never learned about tenses before this unit. I was really surprised that there were so many present tenses, even though these are things I use naturally everyday while speaking. It was interesting, and even at times slightly confusing, to have to dissect the structure of each tense. I think this was a good exercise, not only because it's information I should know when teaching, but also because I got a small sample of how frustrating cases can become to learners. Upon initial interaction, I found present perfect and present perfect continuous difficult to differentiate due to the fact that they both work to relate the past to the present. It was difficult for me to initially understand under which condition I would use one and not another. However, once I began reading the examples and creating more of my own, the distinction became clearer to me. It was also interesting to learn the differences of when to use "for" vs. "since," as it is something that comes very naturally to me. "For" is for periods of time and "since" is for points of time. Similarly, I liked learning the difference between the usage of "been" and "gone;" "been" means it is finished and "gone" means it is ongoing. However, I personally think that as an American, I use "been" far more frequently than I use "gone." I hope that in future lessons I will learn some tips for teaching these tenses as I found them a little confusing to learn. However, as I said previously, maybe it was a good exercise not only to learn the four present tenses, but also to get a sense of the frustration they can cause.