Universite d’antananarivo ecole normale superieure

PART ONE: ENGLISH CONDITIONAL

SENTENCES AND HOW TO TEACH THEM COMMUNICATIVELY

This first part is the theoretical framework of this study. It is mainly composed of literature review and is divided into three subparts. The first one is a linguistic study of English conditional sentences, including syntactic and semantic explanations. The second subpart explains the theory behind which the communicative teaching of conditional sentences lies. The last one is composed of samples of communicative lessons about conditional sentences.

1.1- ENGLISH CONDITIONAL SENTENCES

The main purpose of learning a language is to enable the learners to communicate and interact with other people who use the language by means of that same language. This ability to communicate requires many things such as fluency and accuracy, commonly known as grammatical correctness. If a learner wants to be able to communicate in English, he should know English grammar. According to Ur (1988), “There is no doubt that a knowledge – implicit or explicit- of grammatical rules is essential for the mastery of a language. You cannot use words unless you know how they should be put together”. Thus, the knowledge of grammar is crucial to the ability to use language and is essential for reaching the goal of communication. Conditionals are among the most useful forms for communicating suppositions about events or situations that are contrary to reality. Students who learn to form conditional sentences correctly will add a very important dimension to their ability to understand and learn English in order to communicate complex information in both speech and writing.