Teaching Verbal Aspect

This article is about how to introduce the verbal aspect to students of Czech as a foreign language. In general, it can be said that the description and teaching of verbal aspect is characterized by an effort to provide a short and simple explanation of a very complicated grammatical-and-lexical category. In addition, the tendency to simplify the description has a rather upward character, although it cannot be claimed that this approach would bring satisfactory results. The aim of this article is to show that it is possible to choose another way, i.e. to deal with the functions of perfective and imperfective verbs in more detail. It is appropriate to explain how aspectual pairs are formed, and subsequently to focus on the relationship between aspect and tense and to concentrate on the use of the perfective and/or imperfective verbs in (non) typical contexts. During teaching, it is important to emphasize the understanding of the functions of these verbs by making students aware of the most frequent phenomena. It is also necessary to insist on the correct use of the perfective and the imperfective in different contexts in the past, present and future tenses, so that they can then choose in communication the verb that a native speaker would choose. Although the presented concept may not be very attractive at first impression, as it does not conform to the current trend of restricting the explanation of grammar, experience shows that it proves to be effective, and the students themselves greatly appreciate this approach, which aims at understanding the usage of perfective and imperfective verbs.