How English tenses really work | Present simple: God’s tense
One of the biggest influences on my teaching mindset is the brilliant ELT writer, Michael Lewis, who, amongst other things, laid the groundwork for the lexical approach to teaching English.
Before he got into that, however, he wrote a remarkable book, way back in 1986, about the English verb, called, surprisingly, “The English Verb.”
In the book, Lewis takes a look at the tense systems and forms that we tend to associate with things like “present,” “past” and “future,” and shows us how mislabeled these terms are.
This becomes clear when you look at so-called past tense forms in sentences like:
“He told me it was Thursday.”
“What was your name again?”
“Could you open the door?”
“I wish Barry wasn’t so angry today.”
All of these sentences contain a “past simple” verb form, but none of them are referring to the past. Instead, Lewis tells us, this verb form signals a kind of distance, whether a social distance to maintain a formal register (“What was your name again?” “Could you open the door?”), a distance in reality (“I wish Barry wasn’t so angry today”) or a distance in terms of claiming ownership of the statement (“He told me it was Thursday,”).
The book is full of revelations like this.
In this video, I talk to a high-level English learner, Stefan, about some of Lewis’ observations.