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!

What I have said isn't weird, obviously. I think you may have misunderstood it. What you have described isn't relevant to the "descriptive" and "prescriptive" debate. The "descriptive" camp seek to not include "prescriptive" teaching, and they write books on "descriptive" grammar, to the exclusion of "prescriptive" grammar. So that is quite different from what you have described, which is to do with understanding dialects while also teaching prescriptive, in discrete areas. Again, if you read the books written by your academic source you will see how this debate started.

You have completely and utterly misunderstood! And you have clearly not read Palmer's books. Honestly, come back after you have read his books, and read the document you linked, and re-read my posts.

And the prescriptivists ignore the fact that at some point someone described the grammar they have decided is correct?

I know all about prescriptivism and descriptivism. Those terms are usually used in 1st year linguistics courses to explain to undergraduate students that it’s possible to study grammar by looking at real samples of speech and writing and understand how different structures are formed and the meaning that they are used to convey, as well as learning grammar rules for standard versions of written languages. I don’t come across them much in TEFL research.

I actually do think it’s important to teach grammar. I do it all the time, mostly with L2 learners.

I don’t really understand why you think it matters that there isn’t always just one way of describing and teaching English grammatical constructions? Does it matter if I call ´I was walking along’ present continuous or present progressive? Does it matter if I describe present continuous as a combination of present tense and progressive or aspect or as it’s own tense? It’s a bit like teaching kids to multiple numbers by twelve by either multiplying by six then doubling or by multiplying by 10 and multiplying by 2 then adding the two parts together. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, right?

You are spectacularly missing the point about literacy levels.

It has everything to do with descriptive and prescriptive approaches.
If a teacher moves into an area where the local variety of English has grammatical differences to standard English, it’s helpful to take a descriptive approach and first try to understand what the local kids are saying and what it means, without calling it ´incorrect’ English. And then you can find equivalent standard English expressions and discuss how both the local and standard varieties are formed and talk about suitable situations for using both.
The fact that some linguists have written books about descriptive grammar is a total non issue.

You misunderstood what I wrote again. What you were describing was not related to the debate I was describing.

Perhaps you are seeing things in academic linguistic terms and you aren't aware of the debate which perhaps uses the terms you know differently and to a different end?

It might be because you are based in the US and I am talking about the UK?
Or because you are picking sources without reading them?

I really don't know. I am being quite genuine here.

You aren't understanding what I am writing, for sure, and I am putting it in quite clear, plain English.

I think I just have a broader definition of ´grammar’.
I do agree teaching grammar to primary school children is a good idea.
But you can study grammar in many ways.

I could teach an excellent lesson on informal contacted forms, like ´gonna’ and ´wanna’. We could go into what the long forms are and also why the short forms look like they do. That would involve some phonology too. Then we could do some sociolinguistics and look at what in contexts you see ´gonna’ and ´wanna’ and in what contexts you don’t. We could even try and look at some oral language texts and compare ´going to’ and ´want to’ in different spoken texts to see how the level of formality influences pronunciation too. That might be a more helpful approach for many 1st and 2nd language speakers of English, rather than just saying ´gonna’ is incorrect grammar.

Modal auxiliaries and conditional verbs are more or less the same thing. Conditional structures are part of this system, though they don't always require a modal auxiliary.

The conditional isn't a tense. It is far more complex than that. Aspect is important here - perfect or progressive.

Children are taught the use of these structures, but I'm not sure what terminology is used. I'm not convinced that bunging labels on language that children are using as a matter of course is very useful. It won't solve the 'could of', 'could have' confusion - that requires an understanding of word classes.

I am always reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder in... I think it's The Long Winter, but may be another - where she has to parse a sentence.