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The grammar book teacher course part 18

Over the years, language teachers have alternated between favoring teaching approaches that focus primarily on language use and those that focus on language fonns or analysis. The alternation has been due to a fundamental disagreement concerning whether one learns to communicate in a second language by communicating in that language (such as in an immersion experience). | 114 The Grammar Book And even if the event is a recent one such as I finished my term paper the remoteness comes in the feeling that the event is over and done with. As we saw earlier the feeling of remoteness can apply even to notions other than time If I walked home from school it would take all afternoon. Here the remoteness is due to the conditional hypothetical nature of this statement In fact this is an imaginary conditional sec Chapter 27 and remote from reality. In the example sentence given earlier They said that they loved grammar the remoteness comes from the fact that this is a report of what some other people originally said. It is indirect not their actual expression of affection. And in the host s offer Did you want something to eat before the game the use of the past-tense form of the do verb makes the offer more indirect than it would be if the present-tense form do were used. Here indirectness can be a sign of politeness. This same interpretation explains why the clerk used the past tense in his question to the customer about the price she had in mind. Another example of indirectness as social distance conveyed by the past tense occurs in the following preliminary to a request I am calling because I wanted to ask you a favor. Let us now examine uses of the past tense to see how these notions of completeness and remoteness apply a. A definite single completed event action in the past I attended a meeting of that committee last week. b. Habitual or repeated action event in the past It snowed almost every weekend last winter. c. An event with duration that applied in the past with the implication that it no longer applies in the present Professor Nelson taught at Yale for 30 years. d. With states in the past He appeared to be a creative genius. He owed me a lot of money. e. Imaginative conditional in the subordinate clause referring to present time discussed in Chapter 27 If he took better care of himself he wouldn t be absent so often. f. Social .