Grammar Fix: Yesterday I have eaten: finished time kills the present perfect

Objective & content

students recognise that a finished-time word (yesterday, last year, in 2020, when I was young, two days ago, last summer, this time last week) always forces the past simple, and that the present perfect is simply unavailable once one of those words appears — while also learning not to drop the present perfect where there is no time word and the situation is still true now. The printable is the unit's class pack: one A4 pupil sheet (recognition items, then fill-in and word-order drills) printed once per pupil, and one teacher sheet with the answer key and the notes below.

Pedagogical guide

this is a genuine, near-universal transfer error, but not a universal one: this unit is aimed at every market except the Spanish and Portuguese ones. French (passé composé), Italian (passato prossimo), German (Perfekt) and Dutch (voltooid tegenwoordige tijd) all use their own compound past as the everyday spoken past, freely combined with explicit time words, so speakers of these languages transfer the habit directly onto English's present perfect. Polish has no present-perfect category at all, so Polish learners tend to overgeneralise the unfamiliar English form once they meet it, including onto time-marked sentences. Spanish and Portuguese are the genuine exceptions: both languages already restrict their own compound perfect to time frames that are still open, and switch to a simple past the moment the frame closes (ayer comi, ontem comi) — exactly matching English's own rule for a word like "yesterday." Expect this mistake from French, Italian, German, Dutch and Polish speakers; Spanish and Portuguese speakers' own instinct already lines up with the English rule here. Use it after the class has watched the unit, or on its own as a targeted repair when the mistake shows up in written work.

Suggested procedure

1. (3 min) Write the target sentence on the board and ask what is wrong with it. Collect the class's answers.
2. (10 min) Pupils work through the pupil sheet alone: recognition items first, then the drills.
3. (5 min) Check with the teacher sheet. Read the explanation of each recognition item aloud.
4. (2 min) Exit line: each pupil writes one correct sentence with the structure on a slip of paper.

Adaptations

• [S] Do the recognition items together as a class before pupils try the drills alone.
• [A] ask each student to write two sentences about their own life — one describing something finished, using a time word (yesterday, last year, when I was young...), which must be past simple; and one describing something still true now, with no time word, which must be present perfect. Swap with a partner and check each other's choice of tense.

Materials & prerequisites

One pupil sheet per pupil, one teacher sheet. No audio needed; the Grammar Fix unit video is an optional lead-in. Watch for: this unit drills two directions, not just one. The main error is keeping the present perfect after an explicit finished-time word ("Yesterday I have eaten breakfast", "Last year, I have visited Rome") — most of this sheet's items (8 of the 12 recognition items, plus half the fill-in-the-blank and word-order drills) test this directly. The second, opposite error is the overcorrection this unit specifically guards against: once students learn "finished-time word kills the perfect," they often swing too far and drop the present perfect even where there is no time word and the situation is still true now ("I lived here for five years" instead of "I've lived here for five years", when the person still lives there). A third of the recognition items and roughly a third of the drills are built to catch that overcorrection swing, so a student who has "got the rule" can still fail these — don't mark them down as not having learned anything if they slip here, it is a different, later-stage mistake.

Curriculum alignment

Grammar tags: present-perfect-simple. Filed at B1- (the level where the mistake starts to appear); the example sentences stay inside that band.

Assessment & extensions

The exit line is the check. Extend with the Grammar Fix unit itself, or with the grammar sheet on the same structure when one exists.