Communicative language teaching benefits from context, and a good way to create an engaging situation is to introduce characters with conflicts. When students engage with people struggling to achieve goals, a natural curiosity emerges. Will they or won’t they solve the problem? As teachers, we can use this curiosity to add meaning to grammar practice.
The grammar focus of this activity is the future real conditional pattern, as in If this rain keeps falling, the river will flood. The verb in the if clause is in the simple present form, while the verb in the main clause is in the future form. This article describes an activity in which students start with a story that stops in the middle. At that point, they can use the future real conditional to construct multiple possible outcomes for the characters. By working in collaborative groups, they can use the situation and their imagination to create future possibilities which can be shared with the class, who in turn may be curious to hear what others have to say.
An additional benefit of an activity like this is that it can be refreshed with new contexts. You can even follow up with a role play.
Preparation:
Download the student worksheet. Create a few narrative situations where people have an obstacle to getting what they want. Make sure students understand the conflict. Then have them use the future conditional to speculate.
Here’s an example from the worksheet:
Story:
Oscar and Gigi met when they both took summer jobs working in a restaurant. They fell in love and decided to get married. They even talked about opening their own restaurant. Then Gigi discovered that Oscar was a gamer, and he was playing computer games up to four hours a day. Now she is thinking of breaking up with him. Here are some possible sentences that use the future real conditional.
- If Oscar continues to play computer games, Gigi will break off the engagement.
- If Oscar stops playing computer games, he will miss an opportunity to become a professional gamer.
- If Gigi stays with Oscar, she’ll probably become a gaming widow.
- If Gigi leaves Oscar, she’ll need to find something else to do with her life.
You can flip the order of the clauses by asking students to evaluate the situation by completing the following sentences.
- Oscar’s life will be better if ___
- Gigi’s life will be better if ___
Fun follow-up:
Elicit student votes and display them on the board or screen. See how many people in the class think the couple should work on their relationship.
You can also have a discussion of more substantial issues raised by the conflict. How does the rise of gaming affect relationships and family life? This topic provides additional possibilities for using the conditional to speculate about society.
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