That's the typical reaction I get when I try to explain that English has no future tense. Perhaps the reasoning is similar to that which lead Ann-Marie MacDonald to write that "the present tense will reign"; People tend to conflate tense and time.
But it's not just this misunderstanding. A future tense seems to be some kind of mark of pride. Being told that your language doesn't have one often brings out Chauvinistic zeal in everyone from English teachers to students from Japan, Korea, Turkey, Finland, or Arab-speaking countries. "Of course we have a future tense," they say. In fact, the only group of students I've come across who have no problem with the idea seems to be Chinese students, who actually tend to be rather proud that Chinese has no tenses at all. (Of course, many languages, such as Spanish, do have a future tense.)
But getting back to English, ESL teachers and our materials are almost unanimous in their agreement that will and (be) going to are (is?) the future tense, despite decades of linguistic analysis telling them otherwise. Yet, it makes far more sense to teach will as one of the nine modals rather than teaching modals and then treating will separately as a tense. Similarly, there's nothing special about the going to idiom, which acts almost exactly the same as planning to, hoping to, intending to, etc. From there, it's a short hop, skip, and a jump to the idea that the present tense is often used to talk about future events, and that the past tense has meanings other than past time.
Perhaps someday there will be a pedagogic ESL grammar series with no future-tense nonsense.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
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3 comments:
I usually try to get around the technical definition by mentioning 'future forms' instead of 'future' tenses.
There are many ways to teach it, but I agree that most ESL trainers are oblivious to the fact that there is no future tense.
Thank you for your explanation. I am an ESL teacher at Rice University and I have come across some students who don't believe me, at first, when I explain that there is no future tense, per se. It is really difficult to explain to some of the beginner students because they expect that there is something for past, present and future. I found that by the intermediate levels they seem to have forgotten that it was ever a big deal and the Modals chapter of the Fundamentals of English Grammar is pretty easy for them.
Anyway, I think that any serious ESL teacher should know about this if they took a serious grammar class in graduate school, like I had too. Among others, we used "The Grammar Book" by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman which, I think, does a nice job of explaining why the "future tense in English" is a misnomer.
I hope you teach university level students. People who argue about the technicalities and semantics of metalanguage can do that to their heart's content in a place like that. I guarantee your little tirade would needlessly confuse a beginning students. You know, a lot of teachers want to argue the technicalities of linguistics because it makes then sound smarter (and probably yields better jobs), but we'll see whose students learn better. Try working with simplicity from the ground up (oops, did I end a sentence with preposition... or is it OK as an idiom? - hahahahaha - "From where is your problem?") How about you study English instead of teaching it?
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