What may cause difficulty in teaching tense to Filipino students?

• A. The English language has many tenses
• B. Filipino has no tenses
• C. English uses a simple tense system
• D. Tenses are identical across languages

Answer: (A)

Time is signaled in English through a wide range of tense and aspect forms, each carrying specific nuances about whether an action happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future, and whether it’s complete, ongoing, or relevant to the present. Filipino marks time with aspect and context rather than a long sequence of tense endings, so learners don’t have a one-to-one pattern to rely on when forming English sentences. This mismatch means Filipino students must memorize and apply many English forms that don’t have exact equivalents in their native system, which makes choosing the right tense more challenging. They also have to grasp how different tenses relate to time expressions and to each other (for example, how present perfect differs from simple past or present continuous).

If you see statements suggesting English is simple, or that Filipino has no way to express time, or that tenses are identical across languages, those don’t reflect how English actually encodes time and how learners’ L1 shapes their learning.