This paper examines the use of the present perfect by Korean learners of English. Forty-four first grade high school students and eleven college students participated and wrote an essay on a given topic. The writing samples were analyzed in terms of the appropriate, inappropriate uses of the present perfect and the relations between the inherent lexical aspects and the form use. The results showed that the learners used the present perfect in a good sense with appropriate perfect types. Most of them were accompanied with temporal adverbials such as since or so far. In addition, they also showed many misuses with past, present, and pluperfect for the present perfect, revealing that they tended to encode only one temporal part of the present perfect. Regarding the use of the aspectual verb, activities and states occurred more in the use of the present perfect in the students’ writings. Based on these results, pedagogical implications were suggested.

I. Introduction
 II. Literature Review
  1. The Present Perfect in English
  2. The Aspect Hypothesis
  3. Previous Studies
 III. Method
  1. Participants
  2. Data Collection
  3. Data Analysis
 IV. Results and Discussion
  1. Distribution of the Present Perfect
  2. Misuse in the Present Perfect
  3. The Verb Use in the Present Perfect
 V. Conclusion
 References

• Jungeun Choi(Seoul National University)