Q re national curriculum - conditional tense English language

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Any experts on the national curriculum around? I have been looking at various sites and it seems that the conditional tense is not taught in years reception - year 13?

By conditional tense I mean the conjugated past and present conditional for verbs, for example would have, could have etc.

I have also noticed quite a lot about zero conditional, first conditional, second conditional etc in relation to teaching English as a second language. I was taught formal grammar which I am fairly sure did not include these ways of categorising the conditional tense, we learned the straightforward conjugated past and present conditional for verbs. Are these ways of categorising just taught to people learning English as a second language, and if so why?

Thank you very much!

Pretty sure everything you wrote is foreign.

No idea. I've never been taught any of that.

Modal verbs are taught in about year five and then the tenses would be taught separately. Eg. Could be swimming for modal plus present progressive or do you mean ‘If I were you’, as conditional tense?

I am not asking about modality or modal verbs. Modality is to do with expression and nuance of meaning.

Your example "If i were you..." is subjunctive not conditional (or modal)

Example of conditional: "If I had gone to the shop yesterday, I would have seen it in the sale and I could have bought it"

You will see lots of complaints on MN about people writing "would of" instead of "would have" - the correct one is conditional.

So many people say what you say, that grammar is double dutch, but I have been looking through the academic sites which provide worksheets etc, and fairly extensive grammar is supposed to be taught at school! (Just not the conditional from the look of it which is why I am trying to find a teacher or an expert in the curriculum to answer!)

Conditionals aren't tenses.
A quick Google shows "if" clauses are initially taught in Year 2 in their simplest form, with pure conditional sentences using subordinates in lower KS2 along with the remnants of subjunctives that still hang around in English.

The conditional absolutely is a tense!

My DCs were taught English grammar explicitly in the US beginning in 3rd grade (aged 8). The conditional was taught primarily as abbreviations (could've, would've, should've, hadn't, wouldn't have, shouldn't have, etc). But they also had to do a lot of fill in the blanks-style worksheets with sentences beginning "If they hadn't...", "If John had...", "Had it not been for the snow...", etc.

I learned all my grammar through Irish, again starting around age 8. It has been extremely handy.

Tenses show time. English has two (the word "tense" means the use of a modified base form of a verb to show time of some kind. The only two forms in English that do this are the present simple and the past simple. Every other verb form showing time is an aspect, not a tense.

Conditionals show conditions + results and change depending on the probability of the condition occurring. So, as the OP notes, we have Zero, First, Second, Third and Mixed conditionals. Dealing with hypothesis and probability, not time, they aren't tenses.

That's where English as a second language doesn't help. Those errors are because in a large number of accents, the contracted 'could have' - 'could've', 'should have' - 'Should've' - sounds almost identical to 'could of' and 'should of'. Because the usual method of teaching reading and writing is Phonics, the subsequent confusion in the sounds carries on for some people and they do not realise that it should be 'have' instead of 'of'.

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

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!

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)

I agree with the other poster that the conditional is a tense. It can be used as a tense (past) or as a mood.
Where does your information come from? Is it to do with teaching english as a foreign language?

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.

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.)

Thanks so much for your post. Since I last posted I have looked the subject up, and basically in formal English grammar the conditional has always been taught as a tense and a mood, and academics such as Palmer identify a "real" and "unreal" conditional. The conditional does indeed seem to be not taught to children at all other than very basic "If" sentences in primary as your partner says - and my assumption is that this is why so many people made the "could of" error, ie rathing than writing "could've" which also reflects the swallowed "uf" sound. Apparently usage of the words could, should and would has gone down constantly over the last 20 years which is also to do with it not being taught at senior level probably.

One thing which really bugs me still and which you may be able to help with, is where the zero, first, second conditional etc explanations which are used for EFL came from and why it was devised - have you any idea where that came from, where it originated? Was it via TEFL or a different online teaching source? Just wondering, really. Bugs me slightly because most foreign languages I can think of have a conditional tense/conditional construction, and so it seems counterintuitive to not teach our conditional by reference to their native language, which is going to be more cogent and similar to our conditional. The zero, first etc justs seems to create a whole lot of hoops to think through without much benefit.

Another slightly worrying thing I noticed was that there is also a lot of incorrect info on the net now about the conditional - really misleading, ranging from saying it doesn't exist in English to saying it is under developed. These incorrect references say something completely different from the academic sources, and from the old formal grammar books which are still considered correct. I also noticed statements saying things like "I would like" is not good English. It it is perfectly good English, and thankfully IS on the cambridge doctionary site.

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.

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

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!)

@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.

In relation to contractions, I think that that is a different point from understanding how the conditional operates, because if the underlying grammar is taught properly, the contractions make sense and are more likely to be done correctly. Most children in the UK are not taught grammar properly and have not for decades, in stark contrast to many other countries, and not teaching basic building blocks of language effectively is going to have an impact on everything else studied.

'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 that this is wrong, incidentally. In "I would have helped" the verb "to have" remains a full verb. and "would" acts as an auxiliary.

The stress is on "would" as it affects the meaning of the full verb perhaps.

As an aside, I am not sure why auxiliaries would be referred to as "dummy" - they are pretty key to meaning and nuance!

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!

"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.