Language Teachers’ Beliefs About Teaching the Present Perfect Tense

Abstract

The growing body of teachers’ cognition research suggests that language teachers’ decisions about grammar teaching are influenced by what they know, think, and believe. While previous research highlights that learning the present perfect tense is challenging for foreign language learners, little research discussed teachers’ beliefs about how these challenges are addressed in language classrooms. To bridge this gap and contribute more broadly to teacher cognition research, this study sought to explore teachers’ beliefs about teaching the simple present perfect tense to foundation year students at an English language center at a University in Saudi Arabia. The basic qualitative research design was adopted, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 teachers of English as a foreign language. The findings suggest that teachers had positive views about the value of teaching present perfect tense which were rooted in their apprentice of observation, pedagogical content knowledge and the textbooks. They viewed grammar as an integral component of language learning and perceived teaching grammar implicitly as an ideal approach to enhance language proficiency. However, their reported practices reflected conflicting explicit grammar teaching approach. The reported challenges to implicit grammar teaching were the learners’ proficiency levels, lack of an equivalent grammatical structure in learners’ native language, contrastive analysis, and translation. It was suggested that teachers’ decisions about teaching the present perfect tense were driven by focus-on-form rather than focus on forms approach. The implications for teaching the present perfect tense are discussed and recommendations for future grammar teaching research are highlighted.