Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

Anyway, I managed to get writing-heavy A Levels including English, a first class degree (even took a semester of linguistics) and a PGCE without knowing what a past participle or present conditional is, so I wonder if it is really important to know these technical names?

I think it is useful to spend some time thinking about how language actually works, the functions of words. And it may inspire some people to go on and study linguistics (probably more come from studying foreign languages, but then understanding how languages work is definitely useful.)

For many people it won't be important in the same way that many people couldn't tell you what are stamens or pistils on a plant or what a terminal moraine is nor have ever calculated the volume of a cone or the refraction of light through a prism. And others will go on to work with it as adults.

But having covered a bit of all those things broadens the mind, gives you an idea of different ways of looking at the world, different things that interest you, which is likely to be different from your sibling or the kid who lives next door. It's part of being someone with a well-rounded education - most of us don't remember the details of much of what we learnt at school, but it does all feed into the sort of person we each are.

This is such an interesting thread to read even though I don't understand most of it
I was born in the 80s and at school in the 90s and didn't learn much beyond the absolute basics, until doing GCSEs in French & German.
My eldest child then started school just as the Conservatives brought in their super dull, grammar heavy primary curriculum and I had to start googling fronted adverbials and time connectives and subjugating coordinates etc (he's in secondary school now and reports they basically dropped all the grammar stuff from Year 7 onwards??)

Anyway, I managed to get writing-heavy A Levels including English, a first class degree (even took a semester of linguistics) and a PGCE without knowing what a past participle or present conditional is, so I wonder if it is really important to know these technical names?

Having had an 80s/90s education, my English grammar was mainly nouns/ verbs/ adjectives/ adverbs a few times over (plus punctuation), and most of my knowledge comes from learning MFL at GCSE/ A-level in the late 90s framed by the languages I learned.

Having had to suffer Covid "home learning" to a y2/3 grammar has gone the other way into ridiculously pedantic constructions that are stupidly abstract for that age group to understand. It's now costing £££ to catch him up to the standard expected of y6 because being dyslexic he did not cope with the curriculum requirements and he didn't have the spare capacity to catch up. While I don't give much of a shit about fronted adverbials, subordinate conjunctions or SATs, I do care that he has inconsistent gaps compared to his peers and that can have consequences further on.

There is a happy medium somewhere between neglect of the way a (usually) first language works and the weird post-Gove over-zealous grammar for the sake of it approach. English is a strange fusion of Latin, Germanic and other languages and isn't easy to pigeon hole into a neat structure.

It depends what you're teaching, to be fair - if it's a course with a set syllabus and coursebook and exam at the end, you probably will use technical grammar terms, because they're likely to come up, and it would be weird not to explain them, if you're doing a chapter on prepositions or something.

But if you have a class of refugees from all over the world, who may not have had much formal education in any language, let alone English, then the focus should be on communication and functional use, which is probably enough cognitive load without adding extra info that people don't use in day to day life. I mean, I might have conversations about the subjunctive or gerunds or how Welsh mutations make me cry, but most people probably don't...

That was beautifully explained, @laalaaland.

Amn't I? makes a lot more sense in many ways than aren't I. I was always told I was very well spoken but it wasn't until I moved away for university that I found out 'needs done' is dialectal. Is 'needs doing' also non-standard (as opposed to 'needs to be done')? It sounds so odd to me!

Ooh that’s a lovely construction. I like teaching phonetics and explaining the reason my English learners never seem to hear @mizu ’s 3rdconditional is that vowel reduction turns it into ´If I’da known, I wouldna done it’ . You’ll have to imagine the IPA symbols on mumsnet.

@SnapCrackleandStop tangent but on the subject of region variations - the Scottish (Lothian specific - I don’t know) - ‘it needs done’ always threw me. Along with my absolute favourite- I am’nt. unfortunately I’m not Scottish enough to say I am’nt and get away with it.

Ah I taught conditionals only today - to adults learning English.

We looked at zero, 1st and mainly 2nd but my fav is 3rd (which is taught later on - past often used for regret: If I had studied harder, I would have gone to uni, really complex structure) as students from countries like Vietnam and Thailand have no such thing and really struggle to understand the concept of looking back and saying that something did not happen. We use this structure a lot in English!

I teach foreign languages to adults and I can assure you the vast majority are learning many of the grammatical terms for the first time when they learn a foreign language.
Look at the contents page of any self study book.... Even the beginner books or the easy learning books use terminology that many adults have never heard of.

Yes I definitely agree. Although younger primary school kids might come out with some interesting variations. There’s definitely some variation in how they’re used in different dialects. I’m pretty sure ´I could care less’ and ´I couldn’t care less’ mean the same thing, for example.

Oh yes I should have said it’s learnt intuitively in an English language environment. Having seen how much grammar French and Czech high school students have to do I certainly think we have it easy learning English as we can pick it up mostly easily. I think generally English speakers get the construction of conditionals right without it ever being taught, the ‘would of’ is a pretty understandable mistake imo. You don’t generally hear people saying eg ‘if I have time I’d go to the shop’. Juts referring back to OPs examples I don’t think native speakers get conditionals wrong.

Hello fellow linguist!
And OP, to this I just want to add; type ´universal grammar’ into google scholar at your peril. It always gave me a headache after about 10minutes.

It's a mood.

There are multiple ways of describing grammar. When you try to make a system that works for every language it all gets a bit too abstract for teaching purposes.

Completely agree with @SnapCrackleandStop - this is what I meant when I said we all subscribe to different schools of thought but Snap has summed up my opinion far better! I am also a linguist OP as I know you asked about my academic background. Ultimately I could find you 100 academic sources explaining there’s only two tenses in English, you could in turn find me several which argue with this definition of the word tense and suggest there are more. That’s why I’ve always loved linguistics!

It’s learnt intuitively if you grow up hearing it all the time. Unlike French you can mostly hear the different grammatical constructions, although ´would of’ is the classic counter example. I do think think there’s value in teaching grammar to teen or adult 2nd language learners. It can be an efficient short cut.

Love this example. This thread is a real throwback to when I taught elf! Oh the fun grammar conversations we had in the staffroom ahahah. I always felt native speakers were at a disadvantage because you get sidetracked so easily into things most learns don’t need to know. I tried to explain all the ways to use ‘just’ once. Nightmare.

It means that as long as you understood them, it doesn't matter if what someone says (or writes) is grammatically incorrect.

And for OP - I’m a linguist. We forget sometimes that grammar rules are just observations about how languages function. Then we take the prestige varieties and teach those grammar rules to 2nd language learners and sometimes to native speakers too as though language is supposed to follow the rules and not the other way around. There are multiple ways of describing grammar. When you try to make a system that works for every language it all gets a bit too abstract for teaching purposes. Searching for the ´correct’ answer to whether English has a future tense is a bit pointless. It depends on why you want to know and what you want to do with the answer.

Chill out OP and read some David Crystal. The challenge/fun of English is that it has more syntax than grammar. I think you are hung up on things being ‘right’ whereas most English grammar is up for debate. Does it matter if there is technically a future tense or not? Unlike in French you can’t really get it wrong. I will eat cake/I’m going to eat cake/ I’m eating cake later. There’s no conjugation required and the distinction between when each construction is used is learnt intuitively. In tefl terms you would say ‘I will’ is for spontaneous decisions, ‘I’m going to’ is for a plan ‘I’m eating cake’ is for diarised Items but I could certainly critique that.

I do from age 6-adult C2 so I’m fascinated by different approaches!

Today we looked at using “will” in the present, eg: “oh who is that knocking at the door? It’ll be the postman”