Present Simple and Its Uses

The simple present is used to describe things that are happening on a regular basis or out of habit and they are most often used in common scenarios about what the person does or where he is works.

They are also used to relate facts and things that people accept as common knowledge. In the case of talking about what a person “does”, which requires the third person for “do” in the present tense, the speaker talks about his job or daily activity if he is not working. Similarly if one talks about certain past historical events that are factual, he can say something like “ This Eiffel Tower is in Paris”.

The present simple is also used to relate rules such as how seasons normally occur. A person can then talk about winter by saying, “It is usually cold in winter” or “Winters are cold”. It is a good idea to introduce a verb table here and have the student gradually learn all the present tenses of the most commonly used verbs at first.

Those verbs can later be broken down into families so that the learner can best appreciate the phonetics behind their spelling. The teacher should also introduce topics so that the learner can associate certain verbs and their present tense to tem. This is where the learner will appreciate the use of the verb “be” and its present forms “am”, “is” and “are” especially when talking about countries of origin or describing a person’s personality, age, height and weight.

This will help him break out of the habit of translating from the French or other languages into English especially when talking age is concerned. Similarly the teacher can introduce the present forms of have when getting the learners to talk about his possessions, his education, family or job.