Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Texas? Are you interested in teaching English in Brackettville, Texas? Check out our opportunities in Brackettville, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
This unit emphasizes the correct usage of conditionals and reported speech. It illustrates 5 main conditionals that may appear in our daily English usage.
In particular, they include ‘zero conditional’, ‘first conditional’, ‘second
conditional’, ‘third conditional’, ‘mixed conditional’.
Failure to exert the correct form/usage will result in grammar mistakes and confusion for the readers. In reality, many beginner learners will particularly find it complicated between 1st and 2nd conditionals. Similar problems can appear too with 3rd and mixed conditionals.
To overcome this issue, it is therefore important to introduce some teaching ideas which students may generally find it easier to grasp the concept. The ideas consist of ‘split sentences’, ‘complete the conditional’, ‘chain conditionals’ and so on.
Personally, I find that ‘complete the conditional’ is quite effective for learning, because students can find the answer on their own/with their classmates, and yet they will also be given some flexibility to complete the answers with their own ideas, as long as the meaning is logical.
In additional, this chapter also recaps a series of the ‘verb tense’ (e.g. present perfect will be changed to past perfect) that we need to always take note of when converting our sentence structure from direct speech to indirect speech.
In this regard, it also highlights the rationales of ‘backshifting’. This means to say that both time and physical position would take a step backwards (e.g. tomorrow will be changed to the following day; this evening will be changed to that evening). These changes will need to be highlighted to the students, as they progress to higher language level.
