The usage of English tenses is notoriously difficult for Chinese students to learn, because Chinese is a tenseless language and Chinese students need to activate a totally different system of temporal concept if they want to master English tenses. The usage of tenses in conversational discourse is even more puzzling to them, since most teachers put more emphasis on grammatical accuracy than on pragmatic appropriateness. They majority of our English course books, especially those for high school level, are reading-based and the instruction of tense is normally restricted to the discourse context of narratives. Teaching activities usually include the explanation of the rules for each structure followed by a series of drills for students to get familiar with the rules. In a word, the instruction is confined to sentence level grammar. However, English, as a tool of communication, has a certain rules for tense use in interactive conversation between two or more interlocutors. In Taiwan, where English is a foreign language, there is rare natural environment for English learners to acquire pragmatic usage of English tenses in daily communication. Our students, who are often found speechless when engaged in English speaking, need more knowledge and skills on the use of tense in oral conversation. The present study is motivated to pin down the difficulties that our students encounter in their learning process and offer insight to a more effective teaching. The aim of the research is to answer the following questions: 1.What constitutes Chinese college students’ perspective of past, present, and future in terms of English tenses? 2.How do factors of temporal reference, lexical semantic aspect, and pragmatic functions contribute to the students’ choice of English tense forms? 3.What are the differences between the more proficient and the less proficient students in terms of the use of English tenses? 4.Is their use of tense interfered by their mother tongue Chinese?