Teach english new edition r

2
‘ If we didn’t grow, we’d never be grow n-ups.’
3
‘ If you don’t stop growing soon, it’ll be too late.’
4 ‘And if it’s got caterpillars on it, so much the better!’
We ask the students to analyse the sentences (perhaps in pairs or groups). W hich sentence 
is hypothetical (sentence 2) and how do we know this? (Because it uses past tenses about a 
present/timeless situation.) Which sentence is about the future (sentence 3)? And what are 
the differences between the two ‘present’ sentences (the use of the present continuous in a 
clause in sentence 1; the verbless clause in sentence 4)? They need to notice that in sentences
1 and 4 there are variations from the conditional patterns which they have probably usually 
studied.
Students now try to make their own sentences using exactly the same gram m ar patterns 
(‘I can’t stop it if it’s happening already’ or ‘If people didn’t like spending money, they’d 
never buy expensive clothes’, etc). We can then show them more texts which they have to 
search in the same way, looking for ‘if’ sentences to see if they used the same or different 
patterns (and to determine how different they are).
Later, students can be asked to imagine a new situation featuring George’s grand­
m other (perhaps when she is questioned by the police, or goes to a party or can’t find what 
she wants in a shop). They have to write a conversation in which she uses ‘if’ sentences like 
the ones in the original text. Finally, they can role-play a scene with the grandm other, or, 
instead, have a discussion about the depiction of old people on the TV or in the media.
The point about this kind of language study is that instead of the teacher explaining 
something which the students then have to practise, it is the students themselves who look 
at the language and come to their own conclusions (with the teacher’s help). Using real text 
extracts (from books or the Internet, or listening to tracks from the radio or other recorded 
material) will always provide gram m ar for the students to read and study.
Teaching pronunciation
In the following lesson excerpt (for teenage and adult students at intermediate level or 
above), we tell the students they are going to hear conversations in which a woman asks a 
m an to do something, and the m an replies by saying things like ‘W ell. . . ’ or ‘I’d rather not’ 
or ‘That depends on what it is’ (if the woman says something general like ‘Could you give 
me a hand?’).
Students listen to an audio track in which the woman asks (for example) ‘Could you 
give me a hand with hanging out the washing?’ and the m an says ‘W ell. . . ’. All the students 
have to do is decide whether or not the m an is going to help, and the only clue they have 
to this is the 
intonation 
he uses and the pitch of his voice. After each exchange, we pause 
the audio track and the students discuss whether the m an sounded as if he was saying 
‘Definitely no’, ‘Maybe’ or ‘All right, I suppose so’. The class discuss and analyse the different 
intonation patterns the m an uses.
Later, students can ask us to do things and we can answer using different intonation 
patterns so that the students have to work out which o f the three answers it is. Students then 
ask each other to do things and, using the phrases ‘W ell. . . ’, ‘That depends on what it is’, etc, 
the answering students have to indicate (using intonation) what their answer means.
We can teach intonation (and stress) in many other ways, too:
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Teaching the language system