This study aims to define pedagogical grammar and its content selection criteria for the development of learners’ communicative competence in teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The grammar in foreign language education should be a link for implementing the linguistic theory of the language form into teaching practices. For this reason, pedagogical grammar should be differentiated from normative grammar and descriptive grammar. The study, therefore, selected the opposition between the present perfect and the preterite in the Spanish-speaking world in order to search for adequate perspectives of pedagogical grammar on this grammatical phenomenon beyond the theoretical visions of normative and descriptive grammar. First, this study examined this contrast in Nueva gramatica de la lengua espanola, and then in Gramatica descriptiva de la lengua espanola. Based on the understanding of the norms and the uses of the present perfect-preterite suggested by these two grammars, which were made for native speakers, it was discussed what should form the content of the pedagogical grammar according to the mentioned selection criteria in actual classrooms. The results indicate that it is not just the tense markers but also the speaker’s subjective point of view toward the temporal reference of an action to select the tense for the description of what has happened recently. In the actual Spanish classroom, the preterite that is used in much of Latin America, as well as the present perfect, widely used in the Iberian Peninsula, should receive significant attention.