This paper will discuss some useful ways to teach the concept of time, specifically tense and aspect to foreign learners of Japanese. The concepts of tense (= a relative time, e.g. before or after now) and aspect (=a temporal quality, e.g. finished, ongoing etc.) in Japanese are dealt differently from English (Iwasaki, 2000). Therefore it is critical to explain these differences in the language classroom.
A detailed analysis on time expressions of 7 popularly used textbooks to teach Japanese to foreigners in the US and Japan, has revealed that most books cover most of the crucial structural patterns related to time. However, there is inconsistency in sequencing of the items, such as inflections of predicates; presentation of time particle ni. Also the textbooks vary greatly in the way they present important time related terminologies, such as past and non-past tense or perfective and imperfective aspect. Besides the 7 textbooks used to teach foreigners, a parallel analysis was also done with Japanese textbooks used to teach native Japanese elementary and middle school children in Japan.
Some of the suggestions made in this paper point to (1) the importance of introducing inherent aspect (meaning of the verbs that are internal to them) that will facilitate in teaching how to select the proper tense endings -ru/-ta for verbs (2) the need to introduce temporal connectives, such as tara, toki and tokoro (?ewhen?f) as minimal pairs to bring out their similarities and differences (3) review the sequencing of tense and aspectual inflections in predicates (4) clearly explain the ambiguity of tense and aspect system in Japanese.
The discussion and suggestions in this paper are informed by the analysis done with textbooks used for both foreign learners of Japanese as well as native Japanese school children and will contribute towards effective teaching of time expressions in Japanese.