Past, Present, and Perspective: Teaching Time with the Mind in Mind
By: Jamie Emerson
I recently started teaching again after three years away from the classroom. I now volunteer for a wonderful charity in the UK and teach two B2 level students English for Work. Lately, a lesson contrasted the use of the present perfect with the past simple. I realised that I hadn’t worked on this with students for years. Between 2016 and 2022 my focus was on English for Academic Purposes. Verb tenses were, generally, behind me as we focussed on a mix of academic skills and genre conventions with the occasional analysis of a long noun phrase.
So in my English for Work lesson I was taken back to the first half of my teaching career, when verb tenses were much more prominently featured in the various textbooks I was asked to use: numerous timelines were drawn; pictures of Jack Nicholson (“He has played the Joker”—present perfect) and Heath Ledger (“He played the Joker”—past simple) were displayed; students wore funny hats while I pretended to fall on the floor (“I was wearing a funny hat when Jamie tripped”—past continuous and past simple for interrupted actions).
In my six years of EAP, I hadn’t done any of this. It had been a long time; I realised that I’d missed it. I also realised that what was once familiar had become unfamiliar again. In this article, I’ll outline two things that I noticed or was reminded of as I prepared for, taught, and reflected on my lesson. I’ll also argue that the field of Cognitive Linguistics can help us explore these things with our students.
Talking about Time
Although it barely registers with us, in English we talk about time in a curious way. Take the excerpts from the paragraph above as an example:
- I hadn’t worked on this with students for years
- Between 2016 and 2022 my focus was on…
- Verb tenses were, generally, behind me as we focussed on…
- I was taken back to the first half of my teaching career
- It had been a long time; I realised that I’d missed it
It’s interesting how similar this language is to the following examples, where the theme isn’t time, but space:
- I ran for miles before work
- Between the lamp and the book was a plant
- My old dog was behind me as we walked
- I was taken back to the classroom after I tried to escape
- It had been a long line; I was glad to reach the front.
We can also easily find similarities between how we talk about time and how we talk about matter:
- It was a waste of time
(It was a waste of food)
- You can have some time back
(You can have some money back)
- Can you give me five minutes?
(Can you give me five apples?)
- I’m taking my time to complete this
(I’m taking my old dog to the park)
Living by Metaphors
I’m far from the first person to notice that we talk about time metaphorically, as though it were space, an object, or a resource. This idea is central to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s influential book Metaphors We Live By. They argue that metaphor is not simply a literary device: it is one of the everyday mental tools we use to understand abstract ideas.
The authors note that our earliest experiences are physical. We move through space, handle objects, encounter obstacles, and experience sensations such as warmth and cold. Cognitive linguists like Lakoff and Johnson argue that we draw on these familiar experiences when thinking about less tangible concepts. We therefore speak of “feeling down,” “grasping an issue.” giving someone a “warm welcome,” or leaving the past “behind” us. These are often called conceptual metaphors: patterns of thought in which one area of experience helps us understand another.
Different languages do not necessarily use the same metaphors in the same ways, but the broader tendency is widespread (see this ambitious, international study by Khatin-Zadeh and colleagues exploring conceptual metaphors in 14 languages).
Things and Stuff
We’ve seen that physical, concrete domains are used to describe abstractions like time. As a general point, this is interesting, but it matters for the classroom because it can help learners understand the sometimes subtle differences in how events are described and inform the choices they make. To apply insights from Cognitive Linguistics to language teaching, first a more detailed understanding of how our minds deal with physical domains is needed.
Our everyday understanding of space and location is fairly simple, but what about the matter we find there? Broadly, we can differentiate between things and stuff. Things are bounded, whole, total, while stuff is the opposite.
At this point, it is tempting to give examples of things and examples of stuff but this would give the misleading impression that they belong to distinct categories. In fact, what we perceive as a thing in one context, we perceive as stuff in another. Jerry Seinfeld makes this point well, observing that hair (unbounded, stuff) on somebody’s head is lovely, but a hair (a bounded, individual, thing) on a plate is disgusting.
This is obviously relevant to nouns, and whether they are countable or uncountable, but given that we conceptualise time in terms of space, location, and matter, it’s relevant to verbs too.
Tense and Textbooks
The main English language textbooks I have used in my career refer to “verb tenses”. For instance, in Headway and New English File, the present simple, continuous, and perfect are “present tenses,” and the past simple, continuous, and perfect are “past tenses.” This approach obscures the distinction between tense and aspect; what these textbooks label as tenses are really tense and aspect combinations.
I think one reason for conflating tense and aspect in English is that they are both displayed using verbs. It gets tricky because sometimes a single verb is marked for tense and aspect (e.g. He walks) and sometimes tense is marked with an auxiliary verb and aspect by the main verb (e.g. he is walking).
For example, in “He is walking” the auxiliary verb “is” shows the tense and the suffix -ing on the verb “walking” shows the aspect. In “he walks” both tense and aspect are shown by the verb “walks”.
While “tense-aspect combination” is a somewhat clunky phrase, analysing these combinations is quite a streamlined process and, from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective, it suits how our minds work. Our tendency to conceptualise time as being about locations and matter in space helps: tense specifies a location in time, while aspect specifies a type of matter—a thing or some stuff at that location.
Tense and aspect combination | Example | Can be visualised as… |
Present simple | I live in Manchester. | Thing located in present |
Present continuous/progressive | I am hoping to visit Japan again. | Stuff located in present |
Present perfect | I have been to Paris. | Thing located in past viewed from present location |
Present perfect continuous/progressive | I have been writing for Think Tank for two years. | Stuff extending from past location to present location |
Past simple | I lived in Tokyo. | Thing located in past |
Past perfect continuous/progressive | I had been teaching for several years when I began my Masters. | Stuff located in past |
Past perfect | I had lived in Tokyo twice before I moved to China. | Thing located in distant past viewed from nearer past location |
In addition to referring to verb “tenses,” in their explanations, English textbooks tend to focus on events. To craft their sentences and utterances, learners are encouraged to look for features of an event, such as if it happens regularly, or if it started in the past but continues now. Having a kind of mental checklist with features of an event to help make linguistic choice is undeniably helpful. However, it doesn’t always give us the whole story.
In the Eye of the Beholder
I was struck by this when, shortly after my present perfect vs. past simple lesson, I sat down to listen to an episode of one of my favourite podcasts. Appropriately, given the topic of this article, the show is called Past Present Future, presented by political scientist David Runciman. In the episode, Runciman and the historian Robert Saunders discussed the UK’s General Strike of 1926. Perhaps because tense was on my mind, I gradually realised that although they were talking about the same events, which happened a century ago, Runciman and Saunders used different tenses. Runciman consistently used the past simple (“Baldwin’s government did intervene in the summer of 1925”) while Saunders used the present simple (“There are more than a million people working in the mining industry in the 1920s”).
This is an example of something outlined by Scott Thornbury in this short video: tense is not the same as time reference. All the examples below, adapted from Thornbury, use a present tense (in this case with a continuous/progressive aspect) but refer to different times:
- He’s playing tennis a lot. Maybe he’s lost his job. [present reference]
- He’s playing tennis tomorrow. [future reference]
- There’s a man I know. He’s playing tennis. Suddenly he feels a shooting pain in his chest. [past reference].
On the podcast, neither speaker was making grammatical errors. Saunders didn’t mistakenly think the year was 1926. For him, the story of the General Strike was ‘live’ and for Runciman it was historical. The use of a particular tense-aspect combination tells us as much about their attitude to the event than it does about the event itself.
Attitude is similarly relevant to aspect. For instance, the facts expressed in these sentences are the same:
- I have been living in Manchester since 2024
- I have lived in Manchester since 2024
While the difference between these two sentences isn’t categorical, I’m more likely to use a) if I think the situation might end and b) if I don’t think it will end or haven’t given it much thought. Crucially, this isn’t determined by the activity itself; it’s determined by my perception.
Conclusion: Teaching Time with the Mind in Mind
How should Cognitive Linguistics inform language teaching? Most fundamentally, it should change a teacher’s perception. In the words of Vyvyan Evans, this involves: “a reorientation away from viewing grammar as an arbitrary set of rules to be memorised, and toward understanding it as a meaningful, motivated system grounded in human experience.”
In relation to verbs, Cognitive Linguistics takes the focus away from features of the event being described (Habitual? A general fact? Temporary? Permanent?) and emphasizes the speaker’s perception of the event and the meaning they attach to it. While this can be challenging, it is also liberating, with more room for exploration and curiosity in interpreting language and more room for choice when producing it. I think that some more specific pieces of advice follow:
1) Use the concrete to explain the abstract
In my career I’ve mimed the present by pointing straight down at the ground, the future by pointing ahead, and the past by pointing over my shoulder. I particularly like the YouTuber English with Greg’s hand gestures.
While researching this article, I’ve come across teachers explaining continuous/progressive aspect as a video recording, and simple tenses as photographs and others comparing perfect tenses to a bridge.
When I started teaching, this all felt like a Plan B, or C, or D, to be used when the initial explanation didn’t work. I had it wrong—making abstract concepts concrete like this fits with how the mind works.
Idea for the classroom: Give learners a list of contrasting sentences on a similar theme (e.g. I was reading when the lights went off vs. I read and turned the light off). One learner chooses a sentence and mimes it while the other learners guesses the sentence.
Idea for the classroom 2: Give learners sentences describing a situation. Then give them images and ask them to discuss which image best captures what the speaker thinks will happen in the future.
“I am living here.”
2) Avoid conflations
Rather than conflating them, breaking apart tense and aspect makes a term like “present perfect continuous” less overwhelming; much like how breaking down the components of a word like “postmodernist” (post+modern+ist) gives clues about its meaning.
Similarly, distinguishing between time and tense helps learners make sense of otherwise confusing aspects of authentic language, as we saw in the podcast example.
Idea for the classroom: Use authentic examples in which tense and time reference do not align, and ask learners to speculate on why the writer or speaking has made their choices.
3) Learn a bit about the L1
Michael Swan and Bernard Smith’s invaluable Learner English is a wonderful starting point, and can be complemented by language-specific grammar resources aimed at learners. Seeing how tense and aspect are encoded in other languages can help a teacher to demystify them in English. At higher levels, learners might benefit from and enjoy comparing their first language to English.
Idea for the classroom: In multilingual classes, ask learners to explain to one another how their L1 describes, for example, events in past times. In monolingual settings, ask students to “teach the teacher.”
4) Be selective with all of this
Teachers present different language, and amounts of analysis, to different learners. Beginners might not need to know the distinction between tense and aspect, or that tense and time is as much about perception as it is an event. There is a benefit to clear, actionable rules to follow when you’re getting started in a language. However, as learners progress, then introducing or raising awareness of these distinctions might be beneficial.
Idea for the classroom: Use your judgement and ask yourself: what is going to be most helpful to my particular students in their context?
Jamie Emerson (MA, DELTA) has taught, designed, and managed English courses since 2012 in the UK, Europe, South America, and Asia. He has written for a variety of academic and trade publications and spoken at numerous conferences. He works for Advance HE, a member-led charity for the Higher Education sector and volunteers for The Launchpad Collective, teaching on their Work Ready English programme.