Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

There's also been a very weird construction creeping in lately.

"If I would have finished earlier...".

I did a CELTA course, qualifying just before Christmas. I'm quite good st grammar, done a few foreign languages. Was quite confused by that all seemed to be entirely irrelevant, and it was the first time I came across terms like zero conditional and so on.

Now, I do actually understand it all, and we were told to avoid using technical terms when teaching - so you teach the pattern, rather than the metalanguage of the grammar. But I still need to check if someone said "you need to teach a lesson on the first conditional," to make sure I've got the right one. But that is for second language teaching, not school teaching under the National Curriculum.

(As it is, I'm getting more interviews for techy roles than language roles, so maybe I'll never teach it anyway...)

There's a militant tendency on here and elsewhere that regards anyone with anything to say about poor SPAG as a sub-human fascist.
They will claim that since one can usually tell the intended meaning of "could of" that the use of it is fine and must never be questioned.

English is a "stripped" language, without the range of tenses that other languages have and it needs very little formal grammar teaching for first language speakers, no future tense, for example

Ww definitely weren't taught this in school, but for adult functional skills it's marked as modal.

"Could of" isn't caused by schools, it's caused by ignorance and a lack of desire for correct English from the "but u know wot i ment" crowd.
It's a choice being made quite positively and forcefully by many.

Are you from an EAL background rather than a Linguistics background OP? As somebody from the latter, I agree with @BlindurErBóklausMaður that there are only two tenses. But I know that in the word of EAL one tends to refer to many tenses. I also disagree that ‘have’ is what you refer to as a ‘full verb’ in your previous example - ‘would have’ is the auxiliary and ‘helped’ is the PP. Very interesting to read other perspectives and ultimately we just all align with different schools of thought!

@GrannyAchingsShepherdsHut The terms ‘past participle’ and ‘conditional’ are most definitely used during the teaching of languages in the UK. Secondary schools will use both of those terms, and have done for a very long time (as long as my own memory allows!), during the teaching of French and Spanish.

I was born in the UK in 1982 and never did any of this in school. Ever.

It does seem very complicated (and off putting, tbh!)

You probably were taught it but maybe you didn't bother to learn it.

Y3/4 (age 7-9) learn the perfect tense which seems suitably bonkers so I'm surprised the conditional isn't specifically taught tbh. Agree with pp the could have/of issue falls under contractions though, which are also LKS2.

I went to school in the UK in the 80s where we were taught ZERO grammar.
I had to teach myself before becoming an EFL teacher.
We teach the conditionals to adult EFL students in the following way:

general truths: zero conditional
present, present - when it rains, the ground is wet

future possibility: first conditional -
if +present, future - if it rains, you will get wet

hypothetical / unlikely future: second conditional
If + past , would - if it rained, you would get wet

past regret: third conditional
if + past perfect, would have - if it had rained, you would have got wet.

and mixed conditionals -which are far more common in natural native speaker speech. (e.g. if you had called me, I wouldn't be mad)

It's really tricky for EFL learners and needs lots of practice/exposure.

My partner is a primary teacher and tells me the conditionals are taught as subordinate if clauses from Y2.

They are not taught in the same way as to adult EFL students as primary children (should) already have a firm understanding of the concepts as they are (should be) proficient speakers. They need help to identify them so that they can use them in writing.

The common native speaker mistake of writing 'could of' etc is due to a lack of awareness of the features we use in our connected speech - we have a stress timed language where we change the stress on words/sounds depending on the context, stressing the important information.
'have' is both a 'real' verb ( I have a cat - never pronounced as 'uf') and a 'dummy/helper/auxiliary' verb (I would have helped - always contracted to a uf / of as it doesn't carry any important information.)

I think I have reasonably good grammar. I understand the examples that you've written as sentences, why they're correct and I would formulate them in the same way myself.

But I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I am 40, I have never, ever been taught anything - including foreign languages - that used terms such as past participle, conditional, etc etc. I genuinely do not know what they mean, I have tried to look it up before and I do not understand it at all.

I do not think I am unusual in that. I'm not saying it's right, or how things should be taught, I've no idea frankly! But I think perhaps what you're running up against is not that the concepts themselves are not being taught, but they're not being given the names you would expect.

It is very simple:

there are three conditional verb forms in English:

I could travel to London, but the train is expensive. (possibility, qualified in this example)
I would travel to London, but not on my own. (conditionality, qualified in this example)
I should travel to London more often to visit the cultural attractions. (obligation/recommendation, qualified in this example)

They can be used in the perfect tense (could/would/should plus past participle) e.g.:

I could/would/should have travelled to London, but ... (conditional perfect)

I should not have spent so much on ... (conditional perfect)

Despite a strong foreign language background, I had zero idea about conditionals until I had to teach them to Arabic speaking students.

They were nearly all young males, so…

If I win the lottery, I will buy a car. (First conditional)
If I won the lottery, I would buy a car. (2nd)
If I had won the lottery, I would have bought a car. (3rd.).

So bloody complicated for the poor things!

Thank god I did Latin ... would never have understood English without it 😀