51: The Third Conditional

A long read about pushing regret aside

One of the strangest things about being a novice English-as-a-Foreign-Language teacher—as a native English speaker—is constantly being faced with how little I know about the English language.

When I was studying for my Canadian TESL certificate, my first real moment of ignorance came when my online class briefly touched on verb tenses. There was a clear line in the sand between two groups of people who made up my class: the native English speakers (NES) and the non-native English speakers (NNES). The NNES knew all the tenses and could quickly describe them when prompted. The other side of the virtual classroom was either silent or openly admitted they knew little.

It was an eye-opening moment not only about how clueless NES can be of the rules and structures that govern how we speak and write (because of perhaps changes to education), but also how much more in the know NNES are about a language they might not have grown up speaking.

Being oblivious to grammar rules was not a totally new fact for me, however. When I started working as a copyeditor in my 20s, my mentor mentioned to me after reviewing and discussing my early work that it was clear that I was an intuitive editor. I knew when something was amiss by just knowing; it wasn’t because I could point out how they were using a verb tense or preposition wrong. My intuition doesn’t help me when I’m teaching. In fact, it’s a weakness because I struggle to explain my corrections to students’ speaking or writing. This is why I’m afraid to become a level placement tester.

All of the grammar lessons I’ve taught over the past nearly two years have been as much about my learning as my students’. I’ve had to first understand what is going on in the language and then figure out how the curriculum or textbook or another teacher’s lesson has tried to make sense of the language point for learners. Only now have I started to feel a little bit comfortable explaining the points. Honestly, though, I’m not sure how you can get a 12-year-old kid to fully grasp—let alone care about—the use of the passive tense or past perfect or the second conditional.

Conditionals. The meat of today’s post. To my fellow NES, do you know what the four conditionals are and how we use them? I had no idea until I was faced with having to teach them. They are most easily understood as a group of specific “If” statement structures. If it rains tomorrow (the condition), I will carry an umbrella (the result)—an example of the first conditional.

I want to talk about the third conditional. It describes an impossible situation because it refers to changing something in the past: If I had studied more, I would have received a better mark. You form it with the past perfect (had studied) and then would + have + the past participle. Teaching it recently, I thought about how regret can play into a third conditional statement.

Then I thought about how I view regret.