The acquisition of the present perfect tense by eighteen Brazilian EFL learners was analyzed by using meaning-oriented and form-oriented approaches on corpora formed with compositions, oral interviews and role-plays. The data yielded two major classes of situations, as conceived by the informants - belonging to the past or to the present -, which contrasted with the single, continual time frame conveyed by the target form. As a possible evidence of transfer from L1, there was a strong initial tendency to the use of durative adverbials in combination with the past simple in perfective contexts of experience, current result and recent event, as well as in those of imperfective experience. The use of adverbials as a lexical resource also occurred along with the present simple and the present continuous in imperfective continuative environments. Apart from phonological issues related to the regular past, in most cases, target morphology emerged simultaneously with the final stage in the acquisition of the past simple. HAVE -ed was most successfully used in imperfective contexts which corresponded to the use of the pretérito perfeito composto in Portuguese, especially in contexts of continuation.