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A person I know learns English as a second language. The teacher introduced some basic grammar concepts, mostly simple present, past, and future. For some reason, he introduced present perfect as well. She showed me what he did on the whiteboard: he claims that present perfect is built using the s-form of the verb and not using has/have + past participle.

Does this mix-up make sense somehow?

Edit: I attached an image of the whiteboard. He explained that present perfect requires adding an "s" to the verb and is used when another person does something regular. For example:

She eats cereals every morning.

He walks the dog daily.

Edit: I removed the image again due to privacy concerns.

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    On the face of it, claiming that "present perfect is built using the s-form of the verb" sounds like nonsense. But it is nonsense to such a degree that it makes me wonder if perhaps it is not more likely that there was a miscommunication somewhere. Did your wife happen to take a picture of what was on the board, and if so, could you post it? Regardless of that, could your wife perhaps ask the teacher if she understood him or her correctly?
    – linguisticturn
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 18:17
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    Oh dear, definitely wrong. The teacher's mixed up simple present in the 3rd person singular with "present prefect" That, or the teacher doesn't know what the PP is! Possibly, he's suffering from what is known as a "brain fart". It can happen to the best of us.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 18:27
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    "Continous" on the board is spelled wrong too, it should be continuous Is the teacher very young, fresh out of college? If so, he's probably done an intensive CELTA course and shouldn't be teaching English.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 18:31
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    If a teacher declares "regardless of what any book says" then suspect the teacher.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 18:50
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is a simple mistake on behalf of the teacher rather than a point of language.
    – user81561
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 19:48

2 Answers 2

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You are correct. Based on the photo you provided, this teacher is hopelessly confused and presumably incompetent.

It's not even the only error on that board. "Verbs = actions" is clearly false, and phonetically spelling "eating" as "eedieen" (if I'm reading that right) is wrong in pretty much every dialect.

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  • Pretty much every, but there are some language communities around New York City that use a pronunciation that could reasonably be described that way.
    – phoog
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 9:49
  • I thought the same thing about eedeen, but I can actually imagine some of my teenage students here in Toronto saying it. They could plausibly say it like this.
    – Luke Sawczak
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 14:16
  • The "d" is probably a (somewhat inaccurate) attempt to describe flapping. There are also dialects where word final "-ing" is just "-in." But the "ieen" puzzles me.
    – alphabet
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 20:12
  • I think identifying verbs as 'doing words' as we used to in primary school is fine. I'm aware that it doesn't account for verbs like 'be' and that some linguists define verbs in terms of morphology or syntax (essentially saying a verb is something that behaves like a verb), but I don't think going down that rabbit hole would help your average language learner and it's certainly not grounds to judge someone incompetent. Overall I agree that's an unhappy board. I'm not sure that the crude pronunciation respellings are such a good idea fiuchr strikes me as more a hindrance than a help
    – Au101
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 20:43
  • and there are spelling errors. But in and of itself I don't think using the wrong name for something necessarily means you can't teach someone to speak the language well. I agree there does come a point where you have to say if he doesn't know that, what else doesn't he know? But present perfect is just a heading in a language textbook you don't need to know what it is to speak English. And anyway it's traditional grammatical terminology which isn't always grounded in rigorous linguistics. In Sanskrit the 'perfect' is called 'perfect' by Europeans solely because it looks like the Greek perfect
    – Au101
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 20:47
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The teacher's claim is nonsense. Here is a basic explanation of the present perfect form from the Learn English part of British Council:

The present perfect is formed from the present tense of the verb have and the past participle of a verb.

We use the present perfect:

  • for something that started in the past and continues in the present:

They've been married for nearly fifty years.

She has lived in Liverpool all her life.

  • when we are talking about our experience up to the present:

I've seen that film before.

I've played the guitar ever since I was a teenager.

He has written three books and he is working on another one.

You can compare the examples above to the teacher's suggestion to create nonsense sentences:

(x) They marries for nearly 50 years

It's also evident from the above example that merely putting an [s] would mix up subject-verb agreement.

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  • May I asked why this is CW?
    – Heartspring
    Commented Jul 18, 2023 at 21:04
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    @Heartspring Unoriginality,. I was summarizing what was already obvious from other comments but deserved to be preserved as an answer.
    – TaliesinMerlin
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 1:08

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