Teach English in Dongle Zhen - Zhangye Shi

This unit went over grammar - conditionals and reported speech. It was made clear in the unit that conditionals and reported speech are often challenge areas for english language students. The advice given to tackle mastery is to take it slow with your teaching, to practice, and to encourage the students to work at it slowly but consistently. Practice does help in skill development. There are different types of conditionals, which are as follows: zero conditional, first conditional, third conditional, and mixed conditional. Zero conditional is used when the actions/facts are irrefutable. First conditional is used when a person is talking about a \"real situation in the future that is possible, probable or even certain, once the condition has been satisfied.\" Second conditional is used to comment a present/future hypothetical situation that is not true at the present moment and is not very likely to ever be true. Third conditional is used when referring to a hypothetical past action/non-action and the hypothetical past consequence/result. Finally, mixed conditional refers to \"a hypothetical past action or state, and the hypothetical present consequence.\" For example: If i had studied, I would have a better grade right now. Many students seem to struggle in detecting the difference in usage between first and second conditionals, and similar challenges often occur with third conditional versus mixed conditional. Examples of each type of conditional are provided for in the unit. There are quite a variety of teaching techniques that can be employed to teach conditionals, some of which include: split sentences, complete the conditional activities, chain conditionals (game like activity where students take turns to continue a conditional sentence), what a question - give students moral dilemmas in a conditional form to discuss, nuclear bunker role play (or other scenario type of role play activities), and what would happen if...? activities. It is vital that a teacher is creative to make conditionals more fun to teach and learn! Engagement will help in mastery because it gets the students motivated to overcome challenges and to show stronger work ethic. Furthermore, this unit went over reported and direct speech. Direct speech refers to all sentences of actual dialogue or speech, in the present tense. When reporting direct speech, present tense of the direct speech changes into past form. Therefore direct to reported (indirect) speech requires verb tense changes (i.e. says to said), and pronoun changes if the person reporting is not the person who engaged in the direct speech (i.e. She said, \"I love you.\" can become she said she loved me). Thus, when reporting from direct speech, back shifting occurs (i.e. present becomes past, and \"this\" and \"here\" become \"that\" and \"there\"). An easy to follow direct speech to reported speech diagram for all of the different present and past direct speech tenses is given in this unit and proven to be very helpful in understanding of the unit material. Some teaching ideas for direct and reported speech include: intermediaries (in groups of three, one student says a sentence which is then reported to a third), reporting verbs (make a list of verbs that can replace the 'reporting' verb, give several direct speech sentences, have students select appropriate reporting verb to alter the sentence as deemed fit), and media interviews (report third parties speech). Again, it is valuable to both teacher and students to include a variety of techniques for lessons and activities, to observe and conduct assessment while learning, and to take it slowly!