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!

I am not from EAL or linguistics background. My comments here are based on academic works (in relation to the English language) and also how formal grammar was taught universally before the 60s/70s and is still taught in some schools now - probably mostly only private schools or grammars. The conditional was and always has been taught as a tense and a mood - if you are saying that in linguistics there is only past present and future, that isn't at odds with what I have said - conditional exists in the present and past.

On what basis would you disagree that have is a full verb and what is your academic background (I am not challenging you for the sake of it, just interested!)

Would is an auxiliary - it is a modal verb which is a form of auxiliary verb according to academics. Would have was taught as the conditional tense of to have when I was younger, but at the same time, "would" is an auxiliary (modal).

I am pretty sure I am right here, but if you would like to point me to academic sources which correct me, please do! My main issue here is that the conditional (or whatever you would like ot call it) nor its usage is being taught as part of the NC from the look of it - do you know why?

It looks like it isn't being taught in schools, though, too, so it might be the fault of both. I have to admit that I have no idea what "but u know wot i ment" crowd is - is that a thing? Please can you explain more?!

@ohxmastreeohxmastree as a PS to what I wrote - we may be dealing with semantics here - would you refer to the subjunctive as a "tense" or a what?

sorry i pressed post too quickly - by "or a what" i meant "or an aspect" - can you give an explanation about where the term "aspect" came from, and do you also agree with the other poster that zero, first, second etc is correct? Because my understanding is that academics have described the conditional as "real" and "unreal" - not as zero, first etc which appeared to be exclusively to do with EFL. Are you saying that "aspects" and the use of zero first etc is correct and how linguistics is taught universally in universities and if so could you tell me where those terms came from, ie which academic coined the phrases and when?

Just to reiterate, the academic works on English (by English professors) which I have seen and also my memory of how formal grammar was taught when i was younger, conditional (and subjunctive) are tenses, and the conditional is split into the "real" and "unreal" (not zero, first, second etc)

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

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

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.

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 also been a very weird construction creeping in lately.

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

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!)

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.

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 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.

You are incorrect. It is more likely that the person who said that had not been taught any formal grammar. Where did you get that from? Genuine question

I have noticed this, it seems that the US teach grammar more than we do... pretty bad reflection on us (the UK), really

I have just googled aspect - in linguistics a tense is a quality of verbs which indicates whether the verb occurred in the past, present, or future; an aspect is a quality of verbs which indicates whether the verb is continuous, completed, both of those, or neither. Mood is a third quality. So that makes sense and doesn't contradict what I have said (I don't think) and I think that the poster was incorrect saying the conditional was an aspect (as in only an aspect)

If you could let me know where the zero, first, second etc comes from I would be very, very grateful though!

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

Thanks for your response. I am surprised it isn't taught and I think it should be - but thanks for answering my opening post, really appreciate it.
I have had a look through everything taught and it is extensive... but it is seems to be at a very basic level too, more basic than when I was at school.

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.

and we were told to avoid using technical terms when teaching - so you teach the pattern, rather than the metalanguage of the grammar.

Thanks for this - really helpful - but did they explain why? Does it depend on who you are teaching? Because in other European countries they mostly learn formal grammar, technical terms, so seems very counter intuitive to be teaching people from those countries with the "patterns" rather than formal grammar/ technical terms.

@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.

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

To be fair, my OP was asking about the NC (ie I wasn't holding myself out as an expert on it) and I did also say in a later post that I had looked at what was being taught now and it seemed fairly extensive!!

My sweeping comment did not reflect what has happened since 2015 - it was about the fact formal grammar stopped being taught in many schools in the 60s and 70s - true - but equally, I have read a number of articles about the fact that many teachers are not equipped to teach the grammar requirements of the NC because of this - obviously that doesn't include you given your academic qualifications. I am basing my comment on things I have heard English teachers say recently (I am not including you in this given your qualifications) and the sort of work being done at DC's schools.

I also have doubts about the effectiveness about the extensive grammar being taught - some of it seems too basic, some of it way too OTT. You might disagree! I also think that we need some sort of body in the UK which has expertise in relation to language as there is too much incorrect info floating around - do you agree?

Do you know why there was a change in 2015 and what was different before that? And do you think that the conditional should be taught at senior school?

What language did you use at school OP? French ?

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.