I’ve Been to London. Or Maybe I Went. Either Way, Grammar Is Hard.
Earlier this week, I received a message from a teacher who’s currently taking my Advanced Grammar for Teachers course.
She had just revisited a tricky grammar topic with one of her own students and wanted to share how it went. Here’s what she wrote:
“Sergio, I just have to say—your explanation on Present Perfect vs. Simple Past in our last class was incredibly helpful! I had the chance to teach that topic again to one of my students, and I actually used your approach, your way of breaking it down. It was amazing! It helped her see that she could use both tenses—and more importantly, she finally understood the difference between them. It made the whole topic so much clearer and more practical.”
Her message really stuck with me—not just because it was thoughtful, but because it captured exactly what we’re aiming for in the classroom: clarity and confidence.
The lesson she was referring to focused on Time, Tense, and Aspect, with a particular emphasis on the perfect aspect. It’s a topic that often causes uncertainty, for learners and teachers alike, but when we approach it from the right angle, things start to fall into place.
In that session, we spent time exploring how the perfect aspect works, and we used a definition from Carter and McCarthy (2007: 415) that helped frame the discussion. They explain that the perfect aspect is about “the relationship between two time frames”.
It’s not just a question of when something happened, but how that moment relates to another point in time.
To make that idea more tangible, we looked at several examples:
“I have lived here for about 25 years.” This shows a connection between the past (when the person started living there) and the present—they’re still living there now.
“I had finished the report just before I went to work.” The past perfect helps us understand the order of two past actions: finishing the report happened before going to work.
“By next year, I will have worked at this company for 10 years.” The future perfect connects a past starting point to a future milestone, showing how long something will have lasted by that future time.
What all these examples have in common is that they link two points in time. That’s the core function of the perfect aspect—whether it’s present, past, or future.
But of course, it’s not always that clear. Take “My taxi has arrived.” That one’s fairly straightforward: the taxi arrived in the past, and the result is still relevant now—it’s outside waiting. But then we get examples like “I’ve been to London,” which aren’t so immediately obvious.
This is where the idea of present relevance—a term Bas Aarts (2011: 255) uses really helps clarify what the present perfect is all about. On the surface, it can be confusing. If something already happened and it’s clearly over, why not just use the past simple and move on? But here’s the thing:
it’s not about whether the event is still happening—it’s about whether it still matters now.
I’ve had students say, “But you’re not still in London,” or, “You’re not traveling anymore.” And they’re right. But the reason someone might say “I’ve been to London” instead of “I went to London” usually comes down to context. Maybe travel just came up in conversation. Maybe someone asked if you’ve ever been to Europe. Or maybe you’re explaining why you’re obsessed with British literature, and that trip to London is part of what shaped that.
So even though the trip itself is over, it’s still relevant to the conversation—or to who you are now. It’s NOT just a closed chapter in the past. It still ripples into the present.
During that same lesson, we also looked at how coursebooks tend to handle the present perfect—and how that can sometimes add to the confusion. One common explanation is that we use the present perfect to talk about experiences. But that raises the question: what exactly do we mean by that? After all, “I traveled to Canada last year” is in the past simple, and it’s certainly describing an experience. So where do we draw the line?
Another common rule is that we use the present perfect when we don’t say when something happened—“unspecified time.” But then students see an example like “We haven’t been abroad this year,” and the book says this is because the year “hasn’t finished yet.” Now we’ve added “unfinished time periods” into the mix. So which is it? Unspecified time? Unfinished time? Both? Neither?
It’s easy to see how students (and teachers) start to feel unsure. The terminology often shifts depending on the context, and the rules sometimes seem to contradict each other. What helped in our discussion was stepping back from these surface explanations and returning to the underlying principle:
The perfect aspect links two time frames. That’s the consistent idea we can build on. Once students start to see that, the forms and their uses begin to make more sense—whether we’re talking about past perfect, present perfect, or future perfect.
In the end, our goal isn’t to give students more grammar rules to memorize—it’s to give them tools they can actually use. And that happens through repeated, meaningful practice. When students get to use the perfect aspect in real situations—whether they’re describing personal experiences, outlining past events in order, or looking ahead to the future—they develop an intuitive sense of how these forms work. It stops being about ticking the right grammar box and starts being about expressing ideas clearly and accurately. And really, that’s what language learning is all about, isn’t it?
Keep learning, keep growing—and thanks for letting me be part of your journey!