TP4 - Real Conditionals in the context of therapies
Intermediate level
Description
Materials
Main Aims
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To provide practice of real conditionals in the context of fun and unusual therapies
Subsidiary Aims
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To provide fluency speaking practice in a conversation in the context of everyday routines and situations
Procedure (34-41 minutes)
Initiate a collective brainstorm of different kinds of therapies that can be fun. I'll have one ready ("art therapy") to help them get an idea of what to write. Other answers may include music therapy, dance therapy, etc., and if they hesitate to find examples, I can offer a second one or elicit one from specific Ss.
We will listen to an audio about two different kinds of therapies. Before we listen to it, I will give students the following task for gist listening: take the list we brainstormed from the lead-in and check which of the therapies (if any) are mentioned in the audio. We will then listen, confirm, and have brief OCFB to check the answers. Once that is done, I will take a few sentences from the audio and blank some key words out. I will then ask Ss to fill the gaps with words from a word bank. The words will only have one possible option. If Ss struggle a little, I might have them peer check before OCFB, but if it's immediately clear, we can go straight to OCFB.
We start this section with the full sentences from the previous exercise, now with the blanks filled in. I then ask students to label each sentence as GS (for General Situation) or FS (for Future Situation). This is to begin checking meaning, to see if Ss notice the difference between the two forms, even if we haven't gone into the grammar explanations yet. This will lead to a section where we explain the Zero and First Conditional forms in more detail. I will prompt them for the construction of each one (what verb tenses to use, etc.), and then ask CCQs to confirm understanding of the meaning (eg. "is this always true?" for Zero Conditional, "will the condition always happen?" for First Conditional, etc.) I will give a couple more examples of this in another slide, prompting Ss to choose the right verb form and then answering CCQs themselves. This will be followed by a slide to discuss differences between two sentences, both of which are exactly the same except for the verb form in the result clause. After the previous exercises, Ss should be able to differentiate the Zero Conditional and the First Conditional and explain that one relates to routines or general truths, and the other to specific moments and the future. Pronunciation is relatively simple for this topic, but I'll dedicate some time to covering the 'll sound in the contractions "I'll", "we'll", etc., especially because sometimes it can be weak and hard to differentiate from the pronoun on its own.
For controlled practice, Ss will work on three example sentenes (there are four in total but I will provide the first one for clarity on instructions). Ss must write the correct verb forms and decide if the sentence is for general truths or future specific situations (ie. Zero or First Conditional). A Google Form sheet will be provided, but as a backup plan (in case Ss struggle to open Forms or they are on a device that makes it difficult to open one), the exercise can also be done on the main Google Slides presentation. After selecting/writing the answers, Ss can peer check and then go to OCFB.
A series of sentence beginnings will be provided, and Ss have to complete them so they are true for them. I will give them a few minutes to complete the sentences, and then share them with each other. This can prompt brief conversations between students, who can be broken into pairs or small groups in BORs if the class includes 4 or more students.
