Inversion With the Conditional

The thing I hate about teaching obscure grammar points is that students don’t understand why they need to know this. So when it came to teaching the conditional with inversion (without if), as in “Had I known it was your birthday, I would have sent you a card”, I really felt it had to start with a text. And that text had to be formal in nature. So this activity uses a welcome letter from a fancy hotel. Then students get to write their own rules.

Objectives

• To introduce students to the use of the conditional without if, using inversion
• To show them the context of this form
• To give them practice producing this form: “Should you”, “Were you”, “Had we”

Materials

• Catch-22 Email
• Welcome to the New Haven Hilton

This lesson should really only be done after students are pretty familiar with the conditional. At the very least, they should understand the hypothetical use of “would” and the past tense.

Warm Up

Hand out the Catch-22 Email and give students a chance to read them. Hopefully, they will find the joke (How can you email him if he doesn’t have email?) so funny, they won’t really notice the odd phrasing “Should you need…”
When they’ve had about 2 minutes to read, ask students what is unusual or funny about this email. Only after they get it, draw their attention to the last sentence. Explain that this is a variation of, “If you should need…” and that it is mainly used in more formal contexts like work emails or instructions. If the students look uncomfortable, you can try doing an example on the board.

Should, Were, Had

Now give them the longer text, Welcome to the New Haven Hilton, which mimics a welcome letter from a fancy hotel. This text has examples of all three forms. Let students read them and have one student summarize each paragraph to make sure that they understand the meaning of the form.

Explain that these are the only three verbs that can be put in this form. You can’t say, “Get I paid tomorrow, we can go out to eat.” You might also point out that “Should you…” is the first conditional (real in the present/future), “Were I” is unreal in the present/future, and “Had you” is unreal in the past.

If they aren’t completely comfortable with it, you can give them a few conversion exercises. Give them some “normal” conditional statements and have them invert them.

Do It Yourself

Now remind students that this form is mainly used in formal contexts, such as when listing rules and policies. Put up a few places that might have introductory rules or elicit them from the students. Good examples include school, jail, an airplane, a fancy restaurant.

Tell students to pick one place and write an introductory letter in the style of the handout. They should try to produce three conditional sentences, one beginning with “should..”, one with “had” and one with “were”. Note that HAD is really hard. So students might be forgiven if they can’t come up with an response for that one. It’s a good idea to model the activity yourself to show them how it can be done.

Once students have written their letters, they should read them out loud and other students should guess the context.

That’s it. As always, I appreciate hearing about any extension ideas or variations.