Title of the class: Grammar practice
Age of students: 16-18 (first year of studying)
General topic of the unit that is being studied: Conditionals.
Topic of the class: Zero Conditional.
Goals of the class:
Practical: Training and practicing students' grammar skills, learn how to express certainty in the sentence with the help of Zero Conditionals.
Educative: ability to work in groups.
Goals of the activity:
Practicing how to define Zero Conditionals and to use them.
Description of the activity:
Warm-up
Here the teacher writes two statements on the board. Students work in pairs/groups for about two minutes and agree or disagree with the statement, as well as provide reasons. For example:
Question: Money is more important than happiness.
Question: Success can only be measured by income.
Checking the home assignment
Two students read out loud the stories that they have written using the Third Conditional.
Others listen and make notes on all the cases of the Third Conditional usage and correct the mistakes if necessary.
Introduction of the new topic
We use the so-called zero conditional when the result of the condition is always true, like a scientific fact. Notice that we are thinking about a result that is always true for this condition. The result of the condition is an absolute certainty. We are not thinking about the future or the past, or even the present. We are thinking about a simple fact. We use the present simple tense to talk about the condition. We also use the present simple tense to talk about the result. The important thing about the zero conditional is that the condition always has the same result.
Students watch the video:
Practice
Students do the following exercises:
Teacher tells about the peculiarities of the Zero Conditionals:
Look at these two sentences, both of which are given as examples of Zero Conditional on ESL/EFL websites:
· If he gets there before me, ask him to wait.
· If I'm late for dinner, start eating without me.
Both of these sentences, with imperatives in the result clause, look to me as if they relate to specific occasions, in which case they are First Conditionals, not Zero. We have to think about the function, not only the form.
In fact, the website which gave the second answer says that this is an example of what to do in certain circumstances, not just on one specific occasion, in which case he's correct, this is a Zero Condition. These examples tell us two things:
· Many teachers and experts accept an imperative in the result clause as an acceptable form in Zero Conditional.
· In some circumstances a Zero Conditional can look exactly like a First Conditional
· If I'm late for dinner (any day), start eating without me. (Zero Conditional)
· If I'm late for dinner (tonight), start eating without me. (First Conditional)
Again we have to think of the function, not just the form.
Closing and home task
Now that students have studied Conditonals 1, 2, 3 and 0 they should analyze lyrics of Beyonce's song "If I were a boy" and Joan Osborne's "One of us" and define what kinds of conditionals are used there. Students may find other songs that contain various examples of conditionals.
Also for the next classcstudents should revise the structure of "wish" sentences.
