This is a downloadable ESL activity to highlight and practise the difference between first and second conditionals based on likely and unlikely situations.
To present the difference between the first and second conditionals.
Activity
Students decide if situations are likely or unlikely to happen, and use these situations to form first and second conditional sentences.
Organisation
Pair work
Preparation
Make enough copies of the worksheet for the number of students in your class.
What do I do?
Divide the board into three columns entitled SITUATION, RESULT and LIKELY/UNLIKELY. Write the situations in the SITUATION column.
Divide students into pairs and ask them to decide if each situation is likely or unlikely to happen.
Get feedback from different pairs and add likely or unlikely to the LIKELY/UNLIKELY column.
Now ask pairs to imagine what they would do in each situation. Don’t worry about correct use of conditionals at this point.
Get feedback from different pairs and add some examples to the RESULT column.
Now ask if anyone can make a conditional sentence using one of the likely situations and its result and one of the unlikely situations and its result.
When the student uses the wrong form, reveal the correct structures. The comparison on the board allows you to show students that the only difference between the two sentences is that one is likely and one is unlikely to happen.
Ask pairs to make conditional sentences with the remaining examples.
A tiger walks into this room
I win the lottery
It rains this weekend
It snows tonight
This class finishes on time
My teacher gives me some homework
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The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
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The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
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