Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

Look, I speak French. Your losing me because I can’t follow when you’re referring to French and when you’re referring to English, because you’re translating everything into English. When you say ´we’ I don’t know whether you mean ´we French speakers’ or ´we English speakers’.

I don’t think many people really want an English equivalent of the académie française.
The thing is, a bunch of experts sitting in a room making decisions about which language changes are acceptable and which ones are not doesn’t have any kind of natural authority over language. Political authority sure. But the only reason the Académie Française is the authority over what counts as correct language usage in France is because people accept that that’s the case. If there’s no political will then there is no authority. I’m not sure you’re really grasping the prescriptivist vs descriptionist debate.

David Crystal is an academic source. Where do you think academic sources come from? And why do you assume all academic sources would agree with each other?

You’ve lost me here.
I don’t think it’s helpful to look for one to one equivalents of English and French verb constructions or tenses. They really don’t line up very well.

I think that @SnapCrackleandStop gave a good answer further up the thread.

Some European countries have official language and grammar. By this I mean that there is only one standard, and language is either correct or not, there's no in between.
If, after many years a word or grammatical structure has changed over time this can be debated over and possibly changed, in writing, to proclaim this as a recognised alternative to the past rule. It's a very rare occurrence. We unofficially recognise a standard English grammar system, but it isn't set in stone let's say.

The objective in many European language cultures is often to remain as near as possible to the official grammar and children are taught this as part of their curriculum.

It is a reflection of cultural differences that means the UK treats language and how it evolves differently to many other European countries.
We tend to be far more flexible and fluid in all ways of life, and probably wouldn't like the idea of something being either right or wrong. Our language reflects this and it also shows in the way we choose to educate our children.

OP, you were given the correct answer to your question about the NC in the second reply I think. You disagreed with it. Doesn't change the fact that it was correct in the terms that are used in the national curriculum which is that the things you are referring to are noted as modal verbs in the NC (specifically in the appendix on punctuation and grammar) and are taught in Year 5 as part of sentence structure.

Overall, I think that sadly our education system is not clearly teaching children properly that generally the written word is expected to adhere to more formal rules than the spoken one, and that there are levels of formality depending on what you are writing.

Zero, first, second and third conditionals absolutely make sense! They are so neat and tidy. Four different ways to make condition clauses, four different ways to make consequence clauses, and you can pick and choose which order you put them in and even (in the case of the unreal ones) mix them up.

Present and past conditionals are (imho) more confusing, there are more than two forms. And what about mixed conditionals?

I do think that English Grammar schools did use to want to teach English grammar as if it was Latin, when it’s far simpler than that. In my opinion, it over complicates a veTy simple (grammatically speaking) language.

Take the future tense, for example. There are many ways to indicate future, but why the insistence that there is a future tense when there is no future verb inclination as there is in French, Spanish etc.

“Call me when you arrive” (obviously the future but the verbs are all in the present tense). That will be Lucy at the phone, she said she’d pop by (now it’s the present but we’re using the modal verb “will” which normally indicates future).

OP, as you asked about backgrounds, mine is an Eng Lit degree with MFL, PGCE English (but I never taught in the uk), CELTA and DELTA.

It has become so prevalent that people must think it's right. Another one like that is more smarter replacing the comparative smarter. It's just so common now.

Also OP who would you appoint as a ‘real expert’ in the English language. I’ve met David Crystal a couple of times - he’s an expert- and he’s very interesting on English as a global language and how we’re in a minority in the world in the UK in terms of the number of English speakers there are. So who is the expert?! Americans barely use the present perfect - “I saw it already” (shudder) - many Indian speakers of English will use the present continuous where I would use the present simple, stative verbs aren’t *supposed to be used in the present continuous but that’s a free for all these days - I’m loving it, I’m liking it, I’m hating this. Etc etc. It’s an enjoyable shitshow.

@Abitofalark omg I’d never noticed ‘had I have done’ before - I know it’s wrong but i also sort of think it’s ok 😂 this is probably how other people feel about ‘how about yourselves?’. One person’s acceptable evolution of language is another person’s personal bug bear.

id forgotten what the original question was as the thread has been so interesting but going back to conditionals - it won’t be taught because the overwhelming majority of school children in the U.K. will not need to be taught it. The zero, first, second, third system is useful if you are leaning English and haven’t just assimilated it. Also as a PP pointed out you also start talking about modal verbs which are extra confusing because they are ‘weak’ verbs - native speakers don’t need to know that either really. The ‘could have/of’ thing is essentially a phonetic spelling error that’s quite easy to make but should be corrected you’re right!

the one that is very common but drives me mad is the use of ‘yourselves’ to mean ‘you’. I could get behind teaching THAT in schools lol. I always want to shout ITS NOT A PLURAL ITS REFLEXIVE!!!

Are you French OP? I had wondered earlier in the thread as it seems you want a sort of Académie Française equivalent. It’s not the English speaking way! David Crystal is very much not into teaching formal grammar in an old fashioned way which I why recommended him.

j’ai vu does not translate as ‘I have seen’ it translates as ‘I saw’. This is a common error of translation from French.

To be able to use English functionally simply does not require the same level of grammatical knowledge as other languages. We barely have a subjunctive, conjunction is easy, there’s no case endings… things that I found hardest to teach in tefl are things that ‘you just have to learn’ like which verbs are followed by a gerund and which by an infinitive. Native speakers learn these without direct instruction. You would barely ever hear a native speaker get that wrong eg. ‘I considered to go to Spain’.

the primary school grammar curriculum is mental and isn’t picked up on in secondary school at all so it’s a massive waste of time. How to write is what is important and I think children certainly need direct instruction in that and distinct grammar instruction is a significant but minor part of that.

DH and I taught ourselves (bad 80's comps), DS1 state, prep and then not really enforced at grammar school - lots of SPAG revision. DS2 prep and then private school - no issues with grammar, DD (ADHD, not academic) issues with pronouns when younger, but none now.

The main issues are that state school teachers don't seem to mark stuff sufficiently, it's peer marking and that's not good enough.

Also, to give a classic example of why ´traditional’ latin based grammar can be nonsensical when applied to English - have you heard that you can’t split infinitives? So ´to boldy go where no man has gone before’ is supposedly grammatically incorrect? Except that it makes perfect sense in English. You can’t split latin infinitives but we do it all the time in English. But for a long time children were taught that was incorrect. See also ´Me and my sister went to the shops’ instead of ´My sister and I went to the shops’. What’s wrong with ´Me and my sister’ as the subject of the verb? Objectively, nothing is wrong with it. It’s a construction that’s used all the time and understood by everyone. So we should change our grammar books to reflect actual usage rather than attempt to change well established constructions to suit out of date grammar books.

I don’t agree that French imperfect can be easily translated to the preterite. More often past continuous is a better fit.

I am a PhD student in linguistics (although grammar is not my field) and I have taught many French students English grammar. I didn’t learn much English grammar at school because it wasn’t part of the curriculum at the time but have since learnt loads at university level, alongside French grammar and bits from other languages too.
I know that English has present perfect and it’s constructed in a similar way to passé composé but they really aren’t used for the same things. At all. Most of the time when you translate French into English you turn the passé composé into English simple past/preterite tense. Because we only use present perfect when there’s an important link with the present time. There are a whole series of time marker words that preclude the use of present perfect in English but not passé composé in French.
So you can say ´Yesterday I ate pancakes for breakfast’ but not ´Yesterday I have eaten pancakes for breakfast’. Whereas in French ´j’ai mangé des crêpes au petit déj hier’ is fine. I have spent many hours drawing time lines to explain this.
English Grammar books designed for ESOL teachers are always a good source. But terminology does vary a lot.

The terminology used by linguists or grammarians changes over time as do the ideas and theories about parts of speech, for example definitions of tenses and descriptions of the conditional, as discussed in this thread. I'd never heard of the second and third conditional, although I did do grammatical analysis in school. For what it is worth, I'd say the conditional is a mood but often described as a tense; it features in different tenses. It is an If mood. Subjunctive is also a mood.

Tenses indicate time, namely present past and future, and completeness or incompleteness. We form the future tense by using will before the verb (to go; I will go), although also I am going to. I don't think it is arguable that we don't have a future tense; possibly there are grounds for arguing that tense and mood are in the same category but I'm not an expert so what do I know?

Once you get into it, you see that there is complexity underneath the apparent simplicity of English grammar. Fortunately we learn a lot of it naturally from learning to speak rather than in school but then we also end up with the dreaded could of and had I have done replacing could have and had I done if it's not taught in school.

And I do also think it is dangerous and not good at all that incorrect info is being passed off as correct - it would be better if we had some sort of formal body with appointed experts (real ones) to govern usage of the English language.

I think that depends whether you think linguists should be descriptive rather than prescriptive.

I think when it comes to teaching language - yes you should teach "the standard" language, but once someone is past the basics, they need to start becoming aware of different registers, of regional and slang variations.

If people are actually using the language, they may well see "could of". They might hear "you was". It might not be strictly standard, but it's commonly used, at least round here. If you write a story, once you get to a certain level, dialogue will sound inauthentic if every character speaks as though they were presenting on 1950s BBC.

British English is full of variations in vocab, grammar and accents - I've struggled to understand some other British people and they me, if I'm tired and at my most Dorset. I have words in my vocabulary that I didn't know were dialect until I left home and found people didn't understand me. And then there are all the other world Englishes. We might have been first, but should British English be the standard? Why not Irish or American or Australian or Malaysian? If people are communicating successfully, does it matter if it's not what someone else defines as perfect?

I'm a language learner as well, around B2. I am being taught things - "you probably won't ever use this construction, but you should recognise it in case you come across it in more formal texts." "You've learnt this, but in the north, you're more likely to hear that" - language changes over time and place. It's not immutable.