260 Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Figure 17-3:
Examples
of moral
dilemma
cards using
the second
conditional.
If your classmate saw
the 13 year old child
of a colleague drinking
alcohol, what would
he/ she do?
NATASHA
JALE
If his/her good friend
looked awlful in her
expensive new dress,
would your classmate
tell the truth?
Reviewing the past with the third conditional
This tense is used exclusively to talk about the past. You use it to express
regrets and imagine how things would be if something different had happened.
The third conditional is probably the most difficult structure your students
have to learn. You only teach it to upper-intermediate and advanced learners.
The basic structure is: ‘If’ plus a verb in past perfect tense, the subject fol-
lowed by ‘would have’ plus a past participle verb:
If I had known the shop was closed, I would not have come.
If you hadn’t studied languages, what would you have done instead?
If I had been born poor, I think my life would still have been happy.
You can also use past perfect continuous tense in the ‘if’ clause and the pres-
ent perfect continuous form after ‘would’ in the other clause:
If I had been wearing a seatbelt at the time of the accident, I wouldn’t
have been so badly injured.
If you had known I was coming, you would have been wearing your suit.
One way to practise this structure is by making excuses.
