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How metaphor works:
Students have a lot of grammar to remember
Concepts may be unfamiliar to students
By connecting what they don't know to things they do know we may be able to help them.
Metaphor connects the known and the new.
Looking for the moon.
Have you been to France?
Yes I have. I went last year.
Did you enjoy it?
In this dialogue, the tense changes from present perfect to past. Present perfect to locate the action and past to get
the details.
If you want to see the moon, you use a naked eye to locate the moon in the sky and a telescope to see the moon in detail.
We need to different ways of seeing to look at the moon, we need two different tenses to talk about a past
event.
How to use scissors to teach present perfect.
1 Hold scissors towards the class, pointing up
2. Hold one handle in each hand. The blade controlled by your right hand represents the present. This blade
does not move.
3 The other blade represents 'past to present' Move this back and forward against the 'present' blade, representing
time from past to present.
4 Now you can illustrate the following concepts:
a 'I have lived here all my life'
open blades as far as they will go, keeping one upright, then slowly close them.
b 'I have been to Paris three times.'
The same as before, but stop three times on the way.
c 'I have just finished my homework'.
Put the blades close together and close them quickly.
Past vs present perfect and a broken window.
Tell the students the board is a window, and then 'break' it
by drawing a large jagged hole in the middle. Tell the students that the window represents the present, and write a sentence,
e.g. I play chess in big letters on the unbroken part. The hole represents the past. In the hole, write a sentence
like I played chess last night. Write it in smaller letters to show it is further away. Now write a sentence that starts
on the glass but continues over into the hole: I have played chess many times. Write it in letters that get gradually
smaller so it appears to be trailing off into the past, to show that it includes time from the present into the past. This
is a novel way of visually demonstrating the present perfect, because we see it starting in the present and going back in
time, whereas timelines show it starting in past and continuing to present. This metaphor confirms that it is a present tense
rather than a past tense.
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