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UNIT 16: CONDITIONALS AND REPORTED SPEECH
With this unit I was glad to get back to concepts of grammar that I was familiar with, after so many units full of new terminology! In this unit the concepts of conditionals and reported speech were covered.
Conditionals cover the four main types of “if sentences”: the zero, first, second, and third. As these concepts are very familiar to me, I haven’t described them in detail here. The unit covers them concisely and clearly. The unit also mentions one type of mixed conditional: the combination of second and third conditional clauses.
Mistakes are understandable when learning conditionals, and I think common mistakes can be strongly influenced by the structure of “if statements” in the student’s native language. For example, Italians often construct the first conditional using two future verbs in Italian, and when learning English, they naturally try to construct the English first conditional in the same way.
The unit gives some nice ideas for teaching conditionals, including gap fills, sentence reconstruction, and role plays. It then continues onto the concept of reported speech.
Reported speech is one that many native speakers don’t even realise they’re using, and thus it’s important to think carefully about how to teach it. Briefly, in reported speech, the question words remain the same, verbs take a step back into a “more past” version of the direct speech (called “backshifting”), as do some modals (like “will”, which becomes “would”). At the end we have past perfect, and past perfect continuous, which can’t be shifted back any further and thus stay as they are in direct speech. The table on page 6 shows a nice summary of this.
The unit also mentions the importance of paying attention to pronouns and time expressions, as these can dramatically influence meaning and accuracy. The unit finishes with teaching ideas for reported speech.
Overall this was a nice summary of two major elements of grammar.
