A New Approach to Teaching the English Perfect Tense

The article describes an attempt to work out a program for teaching such a significant English tense-aspect form as the perfect, the stages of its implementation being outlined and types of educational activities being discussed. The main point of the new approach proposed is not to abandon traditional teaching methods, but to supplement them with an important component: the results of a comparative-contrastiveanalysis ofperfect forms in the English and Russian languages. Before turning to the conventional explanations revealing the formation of the perfect and the semantics of its particular uses, we suggest that students should be imparted a more fundamental concept of perfectivity, which is to be considered diachronically. By using the example of the Russian language, they are to be showed how this category can be expressed by grammatical means. This can be achieved by referring to the results of comparative-contrastiveanalysis. When students come to understand what the diachronically primary meaning of the perfect as a possessive construction is, we can expect that the mechanisms of positive linguistic transposition will work. Employing the ordinary practical contrastive method after that will allow of avoiding linguistic interference in numerous particular cases of its use.