The English simple tenses (present and past) arc examined in the con text of pedagogical assumptions usually made about their meaning, use and instruction. It is found that the several meanings ascribed to these tenses are essentially inaccurate. Each tense gains much of its associated meaning from context, and the central sense of each is a kind of modal, rather than temporal or aspectual, meaning, representing subjective interpretations of events and situations. Ways of depicting these tenses in visual displays are proposed and implications for teaching explored.
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