Page 281 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

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Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
If your classmate saw the 13 year old child of a colleague drinking alcohol, what would he/ she do?
Figure 17-3:
Examples of moral dilemma cards using the second conditional.
NATASHA ....................................
JALE ....................................
Reviewing the past with the
third conditional
This tense is used exclusively to talk about the past. You use it to express regrets and imagine how things would be if something different had happened.
The third conditional is probably the most difficult structure your students have to learn. You only teach it to upper-intermediate and advanced learners.
The basic structure is: ‘If’ plus a verb in past perfect tense, the subject fol- lowed by ‘would have’ plus a past participle verb:
If I had known the shop was closed, I would not have come.
If you hadn’t studied languages, what would you have done instead? If I had been born poor, I think my life would still have been happy.
You can also use past perfect continuous tense in the ‘if’ clause and the pres- ent perfect continuous form after ‘would’ in the other clause:
If I had been wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident, I wouldn’t have been so badly injured.
If you had known I was coming, you would have been wearing your suit. One way to practise this structure is by making excuses.
If his/her good friend looked awlful in her expensive new dress, would your classmate tell the truth?