Conditionals
This section is devoted to present an overview of the most important aspects of
conditionals in English. For your reference you will find theoretical explanations,
exercises, and examples taken for real texts. This teaching guide is designed to help
instructors but the exercises are designed to work for your students. This topic has been
divided into parts, simply click on each title and you will find explanations as well
as practice.
Teaching Problems
The Structure of Conditionals
The Semantics of Conditionals
Meanings in Context
Use of Conditionals in Oral Discourse
Conditionals and Related Connectors
Related Verbs
FAQs about Conditionals
Examples of Conditionals
Using the Web to Practice Conditionals
Teaching Problems
Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) cite a survey conducted by Covitt whose results show that conditionals are one of the most difficult topics to teach. The main difficulties lie in the following aspects:
- Form
- Meaning
- Oversimplified explanations
- Time-tense relationship
Form
The structure of conditionals is different from other structures in English because it has two clauses, a main clause and a subordinate clause. The syntactical complexity of this type of sentences is likely to confuse EFL/ESL students who usually begin studying conditionals after 4 or 5 months of instruction.
Meaning
The combinations of the clauses mentioned are many and the meanings they convey have subtle differences that sometimes are tricky even for native speakers of English. It is necessary to refer to the context of the expressions in order to understand if we are dealing with a possibility, a regret, a wish or an action that the speaker is willing to do.
Oversimplified Explanations
Maybe because of the array of meanings conditionals present and the difficulty of clarifying them, textbooks seem to have simplified or grouped different forms, giving as a result simplistic explanations, which are not always the best. A common feature in textbook is the classification of conditionals in three groups with the following structures:
Present + Will: We will go on a picnic if it gets warmer.
Past + Would: We would go on a picnic if it got warmer.
Past Participle + Would have: We would have gone on a picnic if it had gotten warmer.
Time-Tense Relationship
Usually, students are told that sentences in present tense are used to talk about events taking place now, that the past tense refers to actions that ended at some point before now and so on. Then, teachers face the challenge of telling students not to take into account that background when studying conditionals. The relationship between tense and time is not direct and students have to understand now that we use present and past to talk about the future, even more, we talk about a possibility in the future. Again, the use of context here can help ease the transitions from literal meaning to real meaning.
Some of the problems teachers may face when teaching conditionals have been identified. Now, let us move on to the structure of conditionals and its characteristics.
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