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Date :  February 13, 2013       Form 8               Age 15

Grammar lesson

Language aim – Conditionals

Thinking aim – ENV model for describing features of sentences with conditional clauses (Conditionals).

Before the lesson.

Background. We dealt with the theme last year, speaking about 1 and 2 conditionals fragmentarily not systematically. The theme is taken after working with Modal Verb structures where the notions of simple and perfect infinitives were discussed.

The students were supposed to work with banks – to find conditionals, to group them and to come up with a list of features of conditional clauses. 

Taking into account my unsuccessful work with banks for Future and Modal verbs, I decided to change the approach a little.

Problems with previous banks – Students used Grammar sites/books, though were told not to; – Students often choose ‘wrong’ forms e.g. Present Continuous form for speaking about present not future, so it requires time to check the bank which I didn’t do and so the students had a lot of troubles in working with the bank and come up with conclusions. – Students wrote  out too short examples with not enough context to make any conclusions – Students chose examples too randomly often with too difficult context for them to understand and analyse

These problems might have appeared because I came from a guided bank collection (last year, Form 7) when I gave them texts from which they chose examples  to a too free bank collection ( too big  challenge) without enough instruction, discussion, development the skill of choosing the sentences.

So I changed the approach little bit this time.   Change 1 – we worked with the banks in class not at home, so that I can see the way they work and monitor it.

Change 2 -  I prepared texts for banks myself, but I chose pretty long pieces so that they had enough freedom and enough material to choose from. I prepared 3 different texts (John R.R.Tolkien: The Hobbit, Chapter 1; Fellowship of the Ring Chapter 1; The return of the King, Chapter 1) and divided the students into 3 groups – so that they still had different input.

The lesson

1. When I was choosing the texts I read them through and understood that in the texts there were a lot of examples of ‘if’ in indirect speech sentences, so it could confuse the students, you, of course, can work with all cases of – ‘if-sentences’, but I thought it would be too difficult for 8 formers, too challenging, though, it could be too challenging for me not for them,  So I had to decide how to deal with this difficulty, I could ‘edit’ the text by deleting or simplifying the sentences, which I didn’t want to do.   So, I chose another way,  before offering them to work with the texts I made an introductory step. We discussed what “condition” and ’conditionals’ are: sentences which consist of two parts, a condition and a consequence, or ,as some other students put it, a reason and a result. Then I gave them an example from the text with  “ I wonder if ….” to show them that not all “ if’  sentences are conditionals.

2. The students got a text in an electronic form ( I sent them all by e-register e-mail) and they had to find 3 examples of conditional sentences. Now I think that the number of sentences could be more, but I still can’t find the optimal number of examples for the students to work with so that they are enough to find some regularities and not too many not to get lost in numerous examples.

3. The students worked for 10 minutes.

4. I asked them to stop and collect ideas they had got. My question was “What have you noticed about conditional sentences?” Here is the list of things they mentioned.

       - ‘if’ can be like a condition at the end of the sentence or at the beginning of the sentence

      - sometimes there is a comma in the sentence - sometimes it has a modal verb – would/should/will/may/could/can

      -  it has a certain structure   if ______ V …., _______ V…     

5.  Then I somehow pushed them to pay attention to the verb forms in these sentences.  They came up with the following:

Speaking about verb forms –

- they are different in time in one sentence

- conditionals can be about general time; present, future, past

6. Another question, which I think was important was about what we should learn about the Conditionals so that they focused on the ‘grammatical’ features of Conditionals – parameters Time and Probability. So I asked “ What do you think we should study? What should be the aim of our studies?” Here come their answers:

Aims:

1. to understand what tense forms to use

2. to understand when to put commas

3. when to use what Modal verb

The priority:

- to find out the verb forms

- to understand what verb forms are used in one sentence

The answer was unexpected for me. I had thought and I had planned that we would be working on sorting to different Conditionals_ Conditional 1, 2, etc – a very stereotypic approach. Their suggestion was to investigate the verb forms/structures inside one sentence. For them it was very unusual that in one sentence there were two different verb structures e.g. V1(present simple) and WILL V ( future simple). At first I was stuck, but then I understood that this was a very logical way.

7. So here is a list of structures they found:

• if + subject  + V1…., V

• if + subject + V1 …     subject  + V1

• If + subject +V1    subject + will V

• if + subject +had V3,   subject might have V3 

• subject + would V, if + subject  + V2 

 A structure which again was unexpected for me, at least the one I usually don’t work with was the sentences where the second part of the conditional was imperative (the first structure above).

8. Here went the bell, so it was the end of this part of our work with conditionals. The home task was to find at least one example for every sentence structure and if possible to find examples of other structures.