Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Vermont? Are you interested in teaching English in Newbury, Vermont? Check out our opportunities in Newbury, 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 goes over the two types of speech in its title and really begins to demonstrate the complexity of the language. In previous units, such as the ones covering all of the different tenses, we were introduced to how difficult it can be to express different situations and occurrences in the past, present and future in English. Now we see how torturous it can be to foreign learns who want to express conditions and consequences or report speech.
The five different conditions each have their own use of different tenses in different clauses, not to mention one must understand the proper way to use modal verbs to properly convey the relationship between clauses. For example, the sentence ‘If I won the lottery I will buy a sports car’ does not really sound as right as ‘If I won the lottery I would buy a sports car’. ‘Would’ of course implies the unlikelihood of being able to buy the car. Also, using the past tense (‘won’) in the first clause may also confuse or trouble students. Using the past tense in this instance shows the improbability of the condition being met, similar to using ‘would’ in the second clause. Such nuances and grammar rules can be quite tricky for those whose native language does not have such sentence formations, as it is with many Asian languages. My students have a terrible time with conditionals, even forgetting or not knowing to use the word ‘will’ in the first conditional.
Reported speech seems even more challenging to me, though I have never taught it. Backshifting requires students to not only understand a timeline perfectly, but also be able to move through the different tenses fluently to express correct information when reporting speech. They must also be able to switch pronouns properly, which can be very trying for native Asian language speakers as they do not use pronouns as often. To top it all off, learners have to be able to change time references properly (e.g., tomorrow -> the day before).
Both of these types of speech, conditionals and reported speech, require perfect situational understanding as well as a good command of all the tenses. I would guess that high intermediate students would start to learn such grammar patterns.
