Try speaking to, and not preaching to, your students awhile.fluffyhamster wrote:Get with it, Fluff. You give as good as you get. Stop whining.You, on the other hand, metal, start thread after thread, some with little obvious interest or utility, and if anyone dares question the ultimate import of what you're "saying", you then make post after post, point upon point (that's what I meant by (you) "ranting"), which makes it progressively harder for people to continue responding (the points may be "obviously" connected in your mind, but they might not be to the person you're aiming them at).
<just doling out endless reams of exceptions for his students>
It is your view of exceptions which is revealing. did you read Lewis yet?
What exceptions? How the hell is anything beyong the main 4 conditional an exception? It is that kind of view which most debiltates students.
Just because you can't explain anything beyond the main 4 conditionals, doesn't mean you have to hide that fact by filling your students heads with the word "exception".
-much-I-don't-have-to-worry-about-ever-confusing-them classrooms.That is the sort of "junk" (I'd like you to tell me, actually, quite what the first one there means), the sort of mess that Carter and McCarthy (and you) might well throw at e.g. CAE going-on CPE EU students in cushy wow-my-students-can-understand-so
I suppose I can just about see the use in letting one's eyes (or ears) scan through it in trying to extract the general meaning, but it doesn't seem to be the sort of stuff that would exactly help students productively
If your aim is to provide your academy with a 100% CAE pass rate and allow them to clone more students next time round, ... . If not, you need to help them to be productive in the outside world in various native-speaker encounters.
Do a search in the BNC, see how many you come up with.Hmm, my examples sound like they were dragged from a textbook, do they? I was rather hoping they sounded a little more functional, that a context came more readily to mind (knock the 'if' off of 'If we arrived...' and 'If we can/could arrive...' to see what I'm driving at here - 'We modal arrive tomorrow - great eh!'). I'll try to improve upon them, then...not just in terms of quality but also quantity...
I mean, I really am not in the business of ignoring evidence, and this is a totally different matter from "hiding exceptions": no course can ever hope to cover every possibility, and some examples really are, in the final analysis, more marginal than others. (See above implication that writing a textbook would involve hard decisions that some just might not be prepared to make). I accept that there are more than the four types of conditionals covered in many textbooks, and that the best way to deal with and account for the wider variety that exists is to "simply" analyze each clause independently.
Finally:
Isn't the "before" after "remarked" redundant? Tell us how to use the remote form to refer to past actions.
What do you mean by "real possibility"?
In influencing students? No.Those may be examples of bad writing, but I doubt if I'm the only one guilty of ever making these kind of "mistakes" - do they not have their role to play?
I live with your type of "rubbish" every day because all my trainee teachers begin by spouting it.If you expect others to live with and learn from your rubbish, you could at least try to do the same with regard to other people's.