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Conditionals: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis - Renaat Declerck, Susan Reed - Google Books

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Conditionals: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis - Renaat Declerck, Susan Reed - Google Books

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This book is an extremely detailed and comprehensive examination of conditional sentences in English, using many examples from actual language-use. The syntax and semantics of conditionals (including tense and mood options) and the functions of conditionals in discourse are examined in depth, producing an all-round linguistic view of the subject which contains a wealth of original observations and analyses.

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Beyoncé - If I Were A Boy | Music Video, Song Lyrics and Karaoke

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Learn English in a fun way with the music video and the lyrics of the song "If I Were A Boy" of Beyoncé

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Great Song about Regrets used by one of our recent CELTA candidates for

a fab lesson - look for the link to her blog post - might be able to find and upload her lesson

plan and materials http://michelleos69.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/do-grammar-lessons-need-to-be-boring/

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"A Lot Of Things Different" By: ~Kenny Chesney~

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A Lot Of Things Different By: ~Kenny Chesney~ I Do Not Own Any Copyrights To This Song, Just Pure Enjoyment! "If You Could Go Back, Would You Do A Lot Of Things Different?" *Smiles*

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p.114 - book is in your wiki

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Do Grammar lessons need to be boring?????

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Grammar lessons used to freak me out, literally FREAK me out. Grammar lessons seemed to be the least creative and most rule based lessons we teach. Not so in the end. Teaching Grammar forced me to look more creatively at how best to meet my learners needs and my own.

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Lyrics Training

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Brad Paisley - I Wish You'd Stay | Music Video, Song Lyrics and Karaoke

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Learn English in a fun way with the music video and the lyrics of the song "I Wish You'd Stay" of Brad Paisley

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How to Use Grammar Books in Class - Article by Swann & Walters

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How to Use Grammar Books in Class - Article by Swann & Walters

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In your wiki

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1. Moral Dilemmas
Second conditionals are used in real life to talk about questions like "What would you do if you had to choose between letting a war criminal go free so that he'd stop the war and continuing the war until he could be brought to justice?" Giving students a few questions like this to discuss can be intellectually stimulating and produce a good mix of the second conditional and other language. It can also be designed to fit in with the topics of the book (e.g. environmental moral dilemmas) or with their job or studies (e.g. medical moral dilemmas). They can also make up similar questions to ask each other.

2. Guess My Answer
The Moral Dilemmas activity above can be made more fun by getting students to guess their partners' answers before they ask the questions. This also works for other meanings of the second conditional such as tentative offers in negotiations. Give students a list of deals such as "If I gave you 1,000 pounds, would you do my washing up for a month?" and get them to guess what their partners will say before they ask the question. They can then make up similar sentences specifically to elicit a particular response, e.g. "Would you give me your wife if I gave you my bicycle?" to obtain a "No, I wouldn't."

3. Sentence Completion
Give students at least fifteen second conditional sentence starters such as "If I had four legs" or "If I were the richest person in the world". They should complete the sentences with their own ideas and then read out just the part they have written (not the sentence stems on the worksheet) for their partners to guess which sentence they wrote it in, e.g. "People would take photos of me all the time" could be written in either of those two example sentence stems above. The sentence stems could also be moral dilemmas, or you could write them to tie the second conditional in with other language points such as feelings ("I would feel _______ if the internet disappeared") or phrasal verbs ("If _______, I would get on much better with him/her").

4. Problem Solving
Problems like being stuck on a desert island or having a can of food but no can opener are often used in ELT for practice of "going to" for plans. However, as the students are not really in that situation it is much more natural to ask "What would you do if flood waters cut your house off?" and "What would you do if all electronic communication permanently broke down?" People can then debate which idea is best and/or vote on the best idea.

5. Votes
Voting can also be used in other ways to practise the second conditional. For example, people can present their ideas on what they would do if they were put in charge of the world or if they were given superpowers, and then people can vote for the best. The ideas need to be quite outlandish ones like these, because otherwise the first conditional is a more natural tense to use to present your ideas.

6. Consequences Chains
Students say or write a second conditional sentence about themselves, perhaps using a list of possible sentence stems, e.g. "If I didn't have this class now, (I'd still be in bed)." The other students say or write the consequences of that action and the consequences of the consequences, e.g. "If you were still in bed now, you'd oversleep and feel groggy when you woke up", "If you felt groggy when you woke up, you'd drink 3 cups of coffee", "If you drank three cups of coffee, you'd get chest pains", etc. They continue until they reach a certain number of steps (usually 8 to 10 is a good number) or come to a natural conclusion.

6. Personality Questionnaires
This is kind of an extension of the moral dilemmas idea above. Students write second conditional questions to test their partners on one personality trait or more, then ask them the questions and judge their answers without telling them what they are being tested on. The people who are answering the questions could then guess the topic(s) and how well they have done before being told the results. For example, for "brave" they could be asked questions like "If you saw that the person sitting next to you had a gun in their belt, what would you do?"

7. If I Were You
Any fun activities on giving advice can be used with second conditional phrases like "If I were you,...", "If I were in your place,..." and "If I was in your shoes,...". Possibilities include writing agony aunt letters, giving deliberately bad advice, and guessing the problems from the advice given.

8. If You Answered Me That Way
Students ask each other second conditional questions in the hope of getting specific answers, e.g. "What would you do if you won the national lottery?" to make their partner say "I'd quit my job" or "Under what circumstances would you buy a gun?" to get the reply "If there was a foreign invasion." The responses that they should get could be given on slips or a worksheet, or they could write down responses for themselves or others to obtain.

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Fun Activities For The Second Conditional

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1. Moral Dilemmas Second conditionals are used in real life to talk about questions like "What would you do if you had to choose between letting a war criminal go free so that he'd stop the war and continuing the war until he could be brought to justice?"

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The unreal past is used to talk about imaginary situations in the past. You can describe what you would have done ...

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Ideas by Alex Case

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Students can really struggle with understanding and producing If only/I wish + Simple Past/Past Perfect, and can also wonder why they are putting in what seems a lot of effort for a tiny point (if one that figures fairly prominently in Cambridge ESOL exams). All of this can be solved with the introduction of the grammatical term Unreal Past, something which seems scary but in fact is just a fancy way of showing them that they've already seen the same tense as part of the second and third conditionals. For example, "I wish I had chosen a different university" basically means "If I had chosen a better university, my life would have been better/I would have learnt more."

Introducing the Unreal Past by name and showing the links to conditional tenses also helps show the difference between "I wish" and "I hope", with "I hope" being followed by present tenses because it expresses something that could happen, unlike the unlikely/impossible/imaginary meaning of the Unreal Past with "I wish" and "If only". This makes "I hope" similar to the First Conditional, e.g. with "I hope he comes soon" possibly meaning "If he comes soon, I won't get angry." You can also use introducing the Unreal Past to reinforce the differences between the First Conditional and Second Conditional (which they have probably already studied many times). The concept of the Unreal Past can also be used to show really clearly that the if-clause in the Third Conditional has to be something that didn't actually happen, e.g. using "If I hadn't gone to university" when I actually did, in the same way as "I wish I hadn't gone to university" meaning in reality I did.

Presenting The Unreal Past

As I explained above, it is usually best to explicitly show the connection between "I wish/If only" and the second and third conditionals, but that doesn't necessarily have to be done at the beginning of the presentation stage. The first thing students need to grasp is that "I wish/If only" + Simple Past (e.g. "I wish I didn't have to go to school") is talking about the present or future rather than the past. Probably the simplest way of doing this is to show them one or two dialogues in which people are complaining about the present and expressing regrets about the past, and elicit the meanings and structures of the forms used to do both. These dialogues could also include conditional sentences like "If you had taken the route I suggested, we would have arrived three hours earlier" and "If you physically unplugged the internet, you would actually get some work done."

You can also show the connection to the conditional sentences straightaway, e.g. by asking them to match sentences like "I wish I had four arms" and "If I did, I would be the best basketball player in the world" before they try to explain the grammatical and meaning connections between the structures used in the sentences.

You can also combine the Unreal Past with the other major non-past use of past tenses, which is to be indirect/polite. Give students example sentences of all three uses of past tenses (past time/politeness/Unreal Past) and ask them to label the ones which are not talking about the past. They then analyse the two other uses of the past, splitting the sentences into ones which use past tenses to be polite and ones which use past tenses to talk about things which are unreal. The example sentences should be ones that couldn't possibly be talking about the past, e.g. "I wish I had legs like yours" for Unreal Past and "Was there anything else?" for politeness.

As well as the meaning and structure of the Unreal Past, you will also probably want to introduce words and expressions that often go together with "I wish/If only" such as the ones that can be found in the sentences "I really wish you wouldn't snore like a walrus all the time" and "I wish I had done that earlier like my father told me to."

You'll also need to do a bit of work on pronunciation, e.g. on how much you stress the word "only" changes the strength of "If only" and how you can do the same if you add "really" or "do" to "I wish" and then stress it strongly.

Classroom Activities For The Unreal Past

It is generally best to get students used to writing the forms first, so I usually start off with a game combining writing and speaking that I call the Sentence Completion Guessing Game. Students complete at least half of the partial sentences you give them (e.g. "I wish __________ at school" or "I really wish they had never __________") with something that reflects their real feelings about their lives. They then read out just the part they have written (e.g. "I had studied English instead of French" or "thought of Big Brother" for the examples above) and the other students try to guess which sentence it has been written in.

There are also guessing games that they can play without a writing stage. In one, a student chooses from a list of problems that the teacher has prepared such as "It's raining" and "Your big brother bullied you." They make possible "I wish/If only" sentences connected to that problem (e.g. "I wish I had an umbrella" and "I wish I had been born first") until their partner guesses exactly what the problem is.

They can also play a guessing game the other way round. A student chooses a sentence which has "I wish/If only" in it and explains situations in which that thing could be said or thought (e.g. "I can't find the jack" for "I wish I was stronger") until their partner guesses the exact Unreal Past sentence.

You can also set up conversations where the Unreal Past should come up, e.g. mutual complaints, assigning blame, and business meetings to examine where a project went wrong. These can be made into more controlled practice by asking students to compete to make their complaints stronger than their partner's, or by asking them to tell their partner why their complaints and regrets aren't actually bad things with sentences like "If you hadn't broken your arm, you never would have met that beautiful nurse you dated last year."

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Students can really struggle with understanding and producing If only/I wish + Simple Past/Past Perfect, and can also wonder why they are putting in what seems a lot of effort for a tiny point (if one that figures fairly prominently in Cambridge ESOL exams).

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Learn English - the unreal past ("I wish, it's time, I'd better")

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Learn more English with the Shepherd School of English! In this video we look at when to use the past tense for the present time. "I wish I spoke Chinese." Nick Shepherd, an award-winning teacher and author, has spent 30 years helping thousands of students to learn English.

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FOR LEARNERS - FROM BBC LEARNING ENGLISH

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FOR LEARNERS - FROM BBC LEARNING ENGLISH

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Rules and examples

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past = present or future:  unreal uses of past forms

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BBC World Service | Learning English | Learn it

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Answers to your questions. This question: past = present or future: unreal uses of past forms

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Fom testyourenglish.org

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English tests. Put each verb in brackets into a suitable verb form.