Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

Me too. Depends what age/language background you’re teaching but with French L1 teen/adult learners I find it helps break the assumption that the equivalent English ´tense’ can be used in all the same situations as their L1 tense. English present perfect and French ´passé composé’ are in no way equivalent for example. And I’m forever explaining that we mostly use ´will’ to make promises or proposals and it’s not just a case of future time = use ´will’.

Ooh @SnapCrackleandStop i like that even more :-) Only two.

There’s two ways of teaching this. Either as ´tenses’ or as constructions combining tense and aspect.
So then you only have two tenses plus zero aspect, continuous aspect and perfect aspect and they combine to make 8 different constructions

if you look at French, German or Spanish, you conjugate the verb to make it future, eg: Que será (from the verb ser)

In English, you can’t do this. You can use an auxiliary verb, such as “will” but is this making a tense? For example using the auxiliary “would” to make a past doesn’t mean that it’s a past tense. (I would play tennis each Saturday).

You can use the present continuous (I am
meeting Jen tomorrow), the present simple (my exam is next week) or the present continuous of the verb “go” followed by a to+infinitive (I’m going to cook). We don’t change our verbs to a future form in the way other European languages do.

It depends on your definition of tense.
If tense = grammar construction involving verb inflection, used to express time or mood or aspect, then English does not have have a future tense.

It makes my ears ache when I hear it. It’s perhaps because people feel they have to ‘match’ the second clause of the sentence, ‘If I would have finished earlier, I would have gone for a run.’

I’ve only heard this in the last five or ten years.

I wouldn’t have said conditionals were tenses?

in EFL We teach the six (or eight) tenses as:

present simple (I play)
present continuous (I am
playing)
present perfect (I have played)
past simple (I played
past continuous (I was playing)
past perfect (I had played)
and then the two perfect continuous (I have been playing, I had been playing).

would and will are modal auxiliary verbs, not tenses. “Would” for example can be used for conditionals, describing past habits (like when I was young I would always eat my vegetables) and speculation “it would have been horrible to give birth without gas and air”

Applying grammar norms based on highly inflected languages to English is not always helpful. I’ve had French university students complain we weren’t teaching enough conjugation in English class. But there’s not much conjugation to be done in English so it’s not a helpful way to think about English grammar.

This thread just makes me wonder how I managed to learn to speak, read and write at all, as the limit of technicality taught to my cohort at school could be summarised as;

'A noun is what you call something, a Proper Noun is its name, a verb is what you do with or to it and an adjective is how you do what you're doing with or to it'.

Mind you, I was also taught that clear communication is important, as Logorrhoea tends to alienate one's audience, so I think I'll go back to watching the football now.

What language did you use at school OP? French ?

ah do you mean constructions like ´When I was young, I would always refuse to eat my vegetables’.

@BlindurErBóklausMaður is correct. Although it sort of depends on the grammar framework/theory you’re using.
Tense and time are two different things. Different languages use different techniques to talk about time. English doesn’t have a future tense -we use a modal auxiliary ´will’ or whatever the technical name is for the be+going+infinitive construction.
Conditional is a mood. Some languages use tense to express it. English uses modals.
Lots of grammar frameworks were based on latin and then applied weirdly to English.

I think the very fact you say children haven't been taught grammar properly for decades shows very little understanding of the current National Curriculum, which bears no resemblance to what went before it. It is widely acknowledged that the spelling, grammar and punctuation section is ridiculously broad for primary children. The curriculum didn't come in until 2015 so we've not seen the impact of it in adults yet.

We expect 5 year olds to recognise adjectives, verbs and nouns. We expect 8 year olds to also know common nouns, proper nouns, determiners, prepositions, whether a conjunction is subordinating or coordinating, adverbs, personal pronouns and possessive pronouns, as well as recognising simple, continuous and perfect tenses. 8 year olds! 11 year olds need to identify subordinate clauses, relative clauses, embedded clauses and so on. They cover the subjunctive. Is this seriously not enough grammar? I say that as someone with a first class linguistics degree. Things I learnt at university, I now teach to 7 year olds and also hear as questions on University Challenge.

get what from? English is a stripped language, clearly. English has no future tense, clearly. You can see that, no need to get it from anywhere! But you can also get it from any source on the history of English

I absolutely love conditionals, and am
coming at them entirely from an EFL perspective (DELTA and chose conditionals for my specialist topic 🤣)

I disagree with teaching the pattern, because they are so logical, and if you learn three rules about them, you can do them all and mix them up easily. Learning the patterns requires learning six quite complex patterns such as a mixed third-second “if + past perfect, would + infinitive”

The rules are:

1. modal verbs are always followed by infinitives
2. for the hypothetical go back one tense
3. never mix your conditional and your consequence clauses, keep them as separate entities (this avoids “if I would be…”

I like the logic of the 0, 1st, 2nd and 3rd conditionals. That English doesn’t have the complex verb conjugations of other languages.

In fact, all you can do with an English verb is make it a gerund (pres. participle or “ing”), past participle (sometimes if irregular this will be different from
its past simple form) and third person. You have to use auxiliaries to do anything else with it.

knowing that modal verbs require infinitives, so the only way of putting “would” in the past (as in the third condition) is to introduce the auxiliary “have” in the infinitive form which allows
you to then put a past particle “would have bought”

And the concept of anything hypothetical being “minus one,” so “i am a teacher” is in the present because the time matches the reality, but “if I was a doctor” is in the past because I’m not. Grammatically the subjunctive comes under this and it should be “if I were” but given that Cambridge English Testing (the gold standard in theory) accepts “if I was” I don’t always go into this with students.

Has anyone noticed the Police and Emergency services tense?

"well this car has come along here and then he has hit the motorbike and they have both come to a halt"

I learned most of my English grammar while at school in the US (aged 8-14). We did sentence diagramming and all of the terminology used in this thread is familiar to me. But my contemporaries in the UK generally do not have a clue (also about things like I vs me vs myself!) except to the extent they covered these concepts when learning foreign languages.

Hullo!

OP, while it may not be taught in schools (because, honestly, it's a bit of a random and tiny thing for us to add formally to the curriculum), I can assure you it is corrected when we see it. I'm a secondary teacher. It makes more sense to do it that way, because I would suspect it's more an indicator of social class than academic attainment, and perhaps a reflection of the sociolect associated.

However, I have marked and overseen the marking of 300+ GCSE mock English papers since Christmas. I can assure you that not one of those papers contained 'could of' or 'should of' because it was something we were particularly asked to look for as part of an NPQ project one of our staff members was doing. (There were many other more significant errors, however. Tense inconsistency being the most frequent).

(And, ha ha to all the people saying they were never taught grammar at school. It's a BIG part of students' learning now, and has been for 15 years. Times do change!)