Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

Third conditional practice

Ages 11 and up
Levels Lower intermediate –Intermediate
Time 15 - 20 minutes for the basic procedure
Focus The third conditional; narrative (speaking and writing)
Materials A good-sized, visible black/whiteboard or equivalently effective means of displaying a set of sketches, or a prompt sheet (example below)

This is a fairly traditional grammar practice activity (hopefully) made more interesting byo its element of story telling.

Preparation Sketch a route map such as the one shown here (figure 1). What it shows is the route two explorers actually followed (solid line) and various shortcuts and side trips they stopped and thought about taking (dotted lines).
'Procedure' (below) describes a lesson in which you draw this map stage by stage as you tell/elicit the story. But you could just as well display the map all at once (e.g., on a large poster) or stage by stage using pre-made OHP transparencies.

Procedure

1. Tell your class that you are going to learn about the route taken in Africa a hundred years ago by a pair of fearless explorers on one particularly adventure filled day.
2. Quickly sketch the very first part of their route (see figure 1a).
   Say— The solid line shows how they walked to the edge of a pond and stopped.
   [Draw a dotted line straight across the pond to 'X'.]
   Say-- They thought about swimming directly across it to the other side. (Elicit a plausible reason why.)
   Say-- But then one of them thought she saw something big under the water. Maybe two or three big, long things! (Ask what. 'Crocodiles' is the kind of answer you want.)
   [Draw a solid line around the shore of the pond to 'X'.]
   Say-- So they decided to… (Elicit "walk around the pond".) Ask why they did this. (Because of the crocodile, of course.)
   Say-- So they didn't swim across the pond, did they? (No!) But let's imagine things differently. Let's imagine for a minute that they did try to swim across. Let's talk about the opposite to what really happened. "If they…"
   (Try to elicit a continuation of this sentence. If you can't, supply an ending yourself: "If they had swum across, the crocodiles would have eaten them.")
3. Lead a bit of oral practice in the usual way, but not for too long lest learners lose track of the story.
4. Remind them that in fact the explorers did not swim across the pond. Then sketch the next stage of the explorers' trip, with mooted shortcut and actually route, and once again elicit a third conditional. And so on through about five stages of their journey, always eliciting as much from your class as possible and leading them in brief spells of oral practice of the third conditional sentences.
5. Still speaking to the whole class, invite the class to retell the whole story from the beginning, with different pupils supplying different parts of the story. Or, to keep things brief, elicit only the five or so third conditional sentences. One way of doing this is to ask students to cover any notes they have been taking and then pair up. Each pair should write down, from memory, at least one of the sentences. They then check what they have just written against their notes. Then call on various students and ask them to tell you their sentence, without looking if they can.

   Follow on

6. Ask students to imagine a tourist lost in a huge, strange city. Individually, or in pairs, they sketch a few stages of the tourist's route and devise the outline of a story similar in structure to the one above about the explorers. That is, there is a route taken and various short cuts or side routes not taken. (If the work is done in pairs, each pupil needs to have a copy of the route map they have jointly dreamed up.
7. Form new A/B pairs such that each partner has a different route map. A shows her map to B and tells him her story . She should elicit as much as she can and, in particular, try to get B to supply the third conditional sentences. When A's story has been told, B tells/elicits his story in the same way.
8. For homework, give pupils a new route map (e.g., of travellers in outer space) which, again, shows the actual route as well as untaken short cuts, forks and side trips. Their task is to write a story which, naturally, includes appropriate third conditional sentences. Allow students to ignore your map and produce their own.

In mixed proficiency classes
Lessons in which you focus on a single, challenging grammar item (such as the third conditional) are perhaps the most difficult of all kinds of lesson through which to achieve a successful result for all the learners in your class. Learners who have already acquired the item may be prone to boredom and inattention. Your least proficient learners, on the other hand, may be nowhere near ready to tackle something that is, for them, so hard to say (even if they understand what it means) as the third conditional. In this activity it is the narrative element that can furnish your most proficient learners with suitable challenge. They can, for instance, produce more elaborate route maps and stories. It is also the narrative element which can furnish the least proficient learners with input (e.g., sentences in the story linked to pictures) and with an activity (e.g., the mutual story telling) that they too can cope with and learn from. That is, they may understand someone else's story and may even be able to tell an interesting story of their own even if they do not achieve productive mastery of the occasional third conditional sentence.

Seth Lindstromberg