Not a teacher
------
If I may add something from the perspective of a non-native-speaker/learner...
I have yet to see a single textbook in Poland that uses the term
aspect. They list
tenses, such as the
present continuous, usually presented as, sort of, separate entities, in separate units, and the term that is used is always
tense. I assume it's because it's just easier to explain things simply when someone just wants to learn a (foreign) language rather than linguistic terminology (I can easily see the benefits of that approach).
However, the first time I saw the term
aspect, I thought it made sense to distinguish between
tense and
aspect. The first clue is that
tenses can exist "on their own", whereas
aspects can't; they need to "attach" to something. The second clue is that what
aspects can attach to doesn't have to be a
tense, it can be, for example,
to-infinitive.
"It appeared
to have been damaged."
"It seems
to be going well."
Before I discovered the term
aspect, I created a thee-dimensional matrix (that probably had already been created by someone; it's pretty simple), where we have the
past/present split on the X axis, the
continuous/non-continuous split on the Y axis, and the
perfect/non-perfect split on the Z axis. This gives eight (2x2x2) possible "tenses", or "tense and aspect combinations", or "tenspects" (I like the last one best). The drawing below is pretty crude (I have some nostalgia for using MS Paint), but it illustrates how I see it.
I object to treating
will as a
tense because all other
modal verbs would have to be considered
tenses as well then.
Please, do correct me if I'm wrong in anything I've said.