A Look at Conditionals: Pedagogical Implications for Chinese Secondary School Students, by Manfred Wu Man-Fat, Karen's Linguistics Issues

Introduction

Aims

The first aim of this article is to discuss the theoretical issues involved in English conditionals. The second aim is to explore the pedagogical implications for Chinese learners through analyzing their difficulties in learning conditionals.

The first aim is achieved by reviewing conditionals in English and the issues involved in its classification. A comparison of the representations of the concepts related to conditionals in English and Chinese will be made. This will be followed by a discussion of the difficulties of Chinese learners in learning conditionals. The final part of the article contains suggestions on teaching conditionals to Chinese learners.

Significance of the Issue

Conditionals in English have been one of the focuses of study not only in linguistics but also in psychology and philosophy. In linguistics, it has been analyzed from different perspectives, for example, functional grammar (Dik, 1990; Cuvalay, 1996), and semantic and pragmatic analysis (Beck, 1997; Fintel, 1997). There has been a lack of agreement over the meanings and uses of conditionals (Werth, 1992). In the traditional school grammar approach, 'conditionals' are put into the mood system together with 'indicative' and 'imperative' under 'subjunctive'. In English language teaching grammar 'conditionals' are put as 'conditional tenses'. In scholarly grammar they are put under modals. A review of how conditions are explained in different perspectives allows us to know the issues involved. This in turn can improve our understanding of the difficulties of learners and teachers. This also means that more effective teaching methods of this grammatical aspect can be devised. Broadly speaking, different approaches can be grouped into two perspectives: descriptive and pedagogical. The review in this article focuses on both perspectives rather than the research perspective (for example, Athanasiadou & Dirven, 1997b; Auwera, 1997; Dahl, 1997; Tynan & Lavin, 1997) since they are more directly related to English teaching.

There has been a lot discussion on the features of the Chinese language which contribute to the difficulties for Chinese L2 learners in learning English (Chang, 1987; Li & Thompson, 1990; Green, 1996). For example, there are discussions on how Chinese learners are affected by their topic-prominence of their native language in their writing (Green, 1996). Green argues that the influences at the inter-language level cause Chinese learners to 'fail to meet the criteria for appropriate development of coherent argumentation-oriented discourse in English' (p.120). Apart from this, there are discussions on how the English-Chinese code-mixing influences native Chinese speakers in Singapore in their use of English (Kamwangamalu & Lee, 1991) and the frequent omission of relative pronouns in relative clauses among tertiary students in Hong Kong (Berry, 1992). Li and Thompson (1990) compares the differences between Chinese and English in the expression of time order, names, subject-verb agreement, direct and indirect expression, phonology, affixation, suffixes, etc. All these features undoubtedly contribute to the difficulties of native speakers of Chinese to learn English as their second language. Thus, we need to pay attention to the importance of native language (Chinese) in influencing how Chinese L2 learners learn English as a second language.

The learning of conditionals poses a challenge to native speakers of Chinese. It is because in addition to the mastery of different tenses, it involves the sense of prediction, causality and inferences (Palmer, 1979) as well as the use of inversion and negative. Although little attention has been given in research to the difficulties of Chinese L2 learners in learning conditionals, it is logical to see that it is a difficult item for Chinese learners to master.

Due to the differences in how conditionals are expressed in the two languages, identification of the sources of difficulties helps Chinese learners in mastering this grammatical aspect. Subsequently, suggestions can be made on improving the way of teaching. This will also lead to improvement in teaching materials for Chinese learners. This is because most students' grammar (e.g., Murphy, 1995) is prescriptive in nature. They just state the correct usage of conditionals without taking into consideration how native language affects Chinese learners in learning English.

A Review of Conditionals in English

In this section, the issues involved in explaining conditionals as well as the meanings of conditionals adopted in this article will be introduced.

Both Leech and Svartik (1994) and Quirk et al. (1972) classify conditional clauses into those of open, hypothetical and negative conditions. 'Open' conditions are those conditions which may or may not happen. Hypothetical conditions are those events which are unlikely to happen. Negative conditionals involve the use of 'unless' and 'but for'. The three types of conditionals are illustrated by the following examples:

1. Open conditions

'I'll lend Peter the money if he needs it.' (p.96)

2. Hypothetical conditions

'I'd lend Peter the money if he needed it.' (p.96)

3. Negative conditions

'I won't lend Peter the money unless he needs it.'

'But for John, we would have lost the match.' (p.97)

They further explain that conditions can be indicated by conjunctions including 'on condition that', 'provided that', 'in case of'. Apart from 'unless' and 'but for', negative conditions can be expressed by using 'otherwise' through emphasizing the conditions. What complicates the use of conditionals is that sometimes it is combined with implied contrast through the use of 'even if' or 'even though'. They point out that 'even if' can be replaced by the use of 'if' alone. Finally, they mentioned the possibility of combining two conditions by using 'whether ... or', 'whatever', 'whoever', 'wherever', etc.

Quirk et al. (1972) explain that apart from the 'open' and 'hypothetical' conditions, there are some special types of conditional clauses involving special verb forms and word orders to express special meanings, for example, sentences found in legal contexts:

'If any person be found guilty, he shall have the right of appeal.' (p. 748)

They also mention that inversion can also be used to express conditionals, as in the example:

'Had I known, I would have written before.' (p.748)

Palmer (1979) identified several types of conditionals. The first is the basic pattern, which consists of the 'if-clause' (prostasis) and the main clause (apodosis), for example, 'If John comes, Mary will leave.' (p.168). The second type is used for prediction. He gives three further types of predictive conditionals as illustrated by the three examples below:

1. 'If it rains, the match will be cancelled.'

2. 'If it rained, the match would be cancelled.'

3. 'If it had rained, the match would have been cancelled.' (p. 171)

These three examples are similar to the traditional classification of the first to third conditionals.

Among other types of conditionals, conditions can be implicit in the pronoun or noun. There are also the possibilities of present unreal conditionals, 'if' being used in the sense of 'whenever', and conditionals used for inference rather than prediction and causality. Palmer (1979) doubts the usefulness of the traditional classification of 'real' and 'unreal' conditionals, whereas the first conditionals as real and the second and third as unreal. A lot of books on grammar (for example, Murphy, 1995) prescribe that past tenses are used for unreal conditionals. However, the reality is that not all past conditionals are unreal.

In line with Palmer (1979), Swan (1995) also criticizes the traditional classification of 'real' and 'unreal' conditionals. Alternatively, he gives the following classification, which is the 'ordinary tense' and special tense'. In the first type, the use of some tense in both the protasis and apodosis is used to illustrate non-imaginary situations, for example:

'If you want to learn a musical instrument, you have to practise.' (p.259)

The use of present tense in the protasis together with future tense in the apodosis, on the other hand, is used to talk about the future. This is shown by the following example:

If I have enough time tomorrow, I'll come and see you.' (p. 259)

The 'special tense' can be used to refer to imaginary situations, including 'things that will probably not happen, situations that are untrue or imaginary, past events that did not happen, and similar ideas' (p. 247). He gives the following examples:

1. 'If I knew her name, I would tell you.'

2. 'If I were rich, I would spend all my time travelling.'

3. 'If you had asked me, I would have told you.'

4. 'If my mother had been alive, she would have been 80 next year.'

We can see that example 1 and 3 are similar to what Palmer (1979) refers to the second and third types of 'predictive' conditionals.

Apart from this broad classification, Swan (1995) gives a lot of additional information on the use of 'if'. 'Should' instead of 'would' is used in the 'if-clause' in referring to events which are unlikely to happen. 'It it was / were not for' can be used to 'say that one particular event or situation changes everything. The word 'if' is very often omitted in conversation and inversion structures. The word 'not' can be put to express doubt or uncertainty in conditional sentences. In a formal style, 'subject + be' is sometimes left out after 'if'. He further mentions that 'if' can be used to admit a fact and give a reason for it, to explain the purpose of a remark, or used with the same meaning of 'although'. Thus, there is overlap between conditionals and concessive as what Quirk et al. (1974) point out.

Similar to Leech and Svartik (1994), Sinclair (1990) explains that conditional clauses are used to express two types of situations those which sometimes exist or existed and those which do not exist. This is similar to Quirk and Greenbaum's (1973) definitions of the real and unreal conditions. Again he is of the opinion that the traditional classification of conditionals into three types 'does not fully describe the normal patterns of conditional clauses.' (p. 350) In line with Huddleston (1984), he expressed that modals are used to talk about situations which do not exist. Sinclair (1990) gives further information on the possibility of inversion, ellipsis, use of conjunctions such as 'unless', 'as long as', etc. to express conditionals, and the overlap between conditionals and concessive.

The above review of how conditionals are explained indicates that it is not surprising for L2 learners to experience difficulties in learning this grammatical item. It is because in contrast to the common belief that there are fixed forms and meanings (as in the traditional classification), there are a lot of classification in existing grammar. Besides, there are a lot of ways to express conditionals. For example, the use of 'if' does not necessarily mean a sentence contains a condition, while conditions can be found in a lot of other sentences which do not have any of the words which are commonly used to indicate conditions. The latter is what Sinclair (1990) calls 'conjunctionless hypothetical conditionals'. There are many contexts where conditionals can be found, either explicitly or implicitly. Findings of studies have confirmed this observation. For example, Ford (1997) found that some alternative forms of if-clauses are very often used implicitly to express conditionals.

This article adopts the classification of Swan (1995), namely the 'ordinary tense' and the 'special tense' uses for two reasons. Firstly, this classification provides L2 learners with a simple yet comprehensive explanation. In addition, the second focus of this article is to compare how the concepts of conditionals expressed in Chinese are different from those of English. Therefore, a clear and concise classification is necessary for easy comparison. For the same reason, the present article will only focus on the basic patterns. Variations such as passive (e.g., 'would have been taken'), reported speech, negation, negative conditionals (i.e., the use of 'unless', etc.), ellipsis, inversion and conditionals which are implicit will be excluded.

Six examples of the two types taken from Swan (1995) are used in this article for subsequent analysis:

A. Ordinary Tense

1. 'If you want to learn a musical instrument, you have to practise.'

2. 'If I have enough time tomorrow, I'll come and see you.'

B. Special Tense

3. 'If I knew her name, I would tell you.'

4. 'If I were rich, I would spend all my time travelling.'

5. 'If you had asked me, I would have told you.'

6. 'If my mother had been alive, she would have been 80 next year.'

(Swan, pp. 246-248)

The Concept of Conditionals in Chinese Language and Difficulties Faced by Chinese L2 Learners

Studies and literature focusing on how conditionals are expressed in Chinese as compared to English are rare compared to those of other languages. There have been discussion on how conditionals are represented in Japanese (Hasada, 1997; Fujii, 1994), Korean (Chung, 1996), German (Rieck, 1993), Greek (Katis, 1994), French (Lyster, 1996), Spanish (Tynan & Lavin, 1997; Rivero, 1972), and even Mundani (Parker, 1999) as compared to conditionals in English. An exception is found it Eifring (1991), in which he points out the unusual type of using 'if' in Chinese as compared to English. This particular type of sentence does not contain a condition in the usual sense. He terms this type of conditionals as 'Conditionals of Comparison'. A review of the difficulties of Chinese in learning tenses is necessary as the understanding and uses of conditionals requires a rather strong mastery of tenses.

Difficulties of Chinese in Learning Tenses

It has been widely recognized that tenses are one of the most difficult aspects for Chinese to master because of the non-inflected nature of the Chinese language (Chang, 1987; Li & Thompson, 1990). Since verbs are not conjugated to reflecting time relations in Chinese, 'learners have serious difficulties in handling English tenses and aspects' (Chang, 1987, p. 228). Chinese and other languages without true tenses the concept of time is expressed by adverbs and other implicit and contextual assumptions (Levinson, 1983). Another factor which contributes to the difficulties is the difference in the concept of time of Chinese as compared to native speakers of English (Hinkel, 1992). Hinkel (1992) compares the time concepts of 130 ESL students consisted of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic with that of native speakers of English. He found that the different concepts of time of non-native speakers with those of native speakers contribute to their difficulties in learning the English tenses. His conclusion is that despite the extensive L2 instruction his subjects had received, the intuitive conceptualization of time of them had only changed to a limited extent. The Chinese subjects in her study perceived present progressive and past simple as almost the same as their native language. Previous studies (for example, Guiora, 1983; Coppertiers, 1987) also found the meanings of English tenses were more like of those of their native languages rather than those of native speakers of English.

Difficulties of Chinese in Learning Conditionals

Conditionals are expressed in Chinese by using the adverbial 'Jiaru' ('if') in the head of the protasis. This is followed by several possibilities of adverbials in the apodosis, depending on the type of conditionals being used.

The meaning of example 1 is easily understood by Chinese learners. This is the most basic pattern and the cause and effect is clear. Example 2 is a prediction of what will happen in the future. When the sentence is translated into Chinese, the sense of prediction is indicated by the adverbial 'Mingtian' (tomorrow), rather than the use of future tense in the apodosis. If we omit the adverbial 'tomorrow' in this example, native English speakers will still know it is a prediction. However, for Chinese learners, the sentence (without 'tomorrow') can refer to situations that exist, existed or non-exist. Thus the sentence in Chinese can refer to conditions as indicated by example 3 and 4. Examples 2 and 4 are all expressed in the same way in Chinese by using 'Ruguo' ('if') in the protasis and 'hui' (will) in the apodosis before the verb to indicate the sense of future in the sentences.

In Chinese, there is no differentiation between the two tenses used in example 5 and 6. Both tenses are indicated by adding the adverbial 'yijin' (already). Similar to example 2, the past time is indicated by adverbials such as 'yesterday', 'last week'. An alternative is adding 'zaoyidian' (earlier) to indicate the event has already happened and the inference that it did not happen in reality.

From this illustration we know that in Chinese there is no concept of the different types of conditionals. The function of differentiating 'ordinary tense' and special tense' in English by using tenses is achieved by other means, including contexts and adverbials. For example, in expressing the meaning of example, a speaker of Chinese normally will assume hearers have already understood the event did not happen (they did not know her name). Comrie (1986) reminds us that compared to most languages Mandarin is an exception as it lacks a differentiation between the different degrees of conditionals. According to him, most languages have at least two different degrees of differentiation.

As the learning of tenses, in learning conditionals Chinese learners are faced with a totally new set of classification of situations. This set of classification has no counterpart in their own native language. Among the six examples illustrated, most Chinese learners will have difficulties in learning example 3 to 6, that is the 'special tense'. Among these 4 types of 'special tense', they will find the types as indicated by example 5 and 6 the most difficult.

In summary, Chinese learners have the following difficulties in learning conditionals:

1. Differentiating the real and unreal situations.

2. Using the correct tenses to express the desired meanings of conditionals.

3. Differentiating the senses of prediction, causality and inferences by using different types of conditionals.

Pedagogical Implications for Teaching of Conditionals to Chinese Learners

The three difficulties described above provide a lot of implications for the teaching of conditionals for Chinese learners. For example, based on the findings of her study, Hinkel (1992) proposes that in teaching English tenses teachers have to explain English time attributes thoroughly rather than assuming L2 learners will understand them as long as they have acquired the rules. Similarly, in teaching conditionals teachers have to make sure learners understand the basic concepts of the different types of conditionals before going into details the forms and the morphological systems.

The above suggestion is a good starting point for the teaching of conditionals to Chinese learners who are facing difficulties in differentiating the different types of conditionals. Instead of start teaching the pedagogical grammar materials directly as most teachers do, teachers can start teaching conditionals by showing the differences between the two most basic patterns (the 'ordinary tense' and 'special tense'). Examples from real life, or even song lyrics and excerpts from films can be used to create authenticity. Then teachers should ensure that learners are familiar with the fact that 'ordinary tense' is used to refer to situations which are not imaginary as indicated by example 1 and 2. The next step is to explain to learners the concept of imaginary situations to learners. This step is particularly important because imaginary situations are not expressed explicitly in Chinese as already mentioned. Care should also be taken to make sure learners have a firm understanding of how to use the proper tenses to indicate the different types of unreal situations as Chinese is a non-inflectional language. A review of tenses should be done if necessary. There differences between the two broad types of conditionals should be explained clearly. It is because due to the influence of their native language, a lot of Chinese have the concept that past tense is used to refer to the past, present tense to the present, future tense to the future (Chang, 1987). As Swan (1996) suggests, the difference between the use of present and past tense in conditionals is not a difference of time, as both tenses can be used to refer to the present or future. Past tense is used for situations which are less probable, or more remote. A lot of Chinese do not have this concept and teachers should spend time in clarifying this to them.

Since the expression of conditionals relies heavily on the use of adverbials in Chinese, teachers have to pay particular attention to the proper use of adverbials. From my personal experience, Chinese L2 learners tend to borrow from their native language by adding a lot of unnecessary adverbials to indicate time and aspects. For example, to many learners adverbials of time such as ‘last week’, ‘tomorrow’ is a must in indicating time. Another common mistake Chinese L2 learners make is the frequent use of ‘therefore’ in the apodosis in ‘if’ sentences. In teaching conditionals teachers have to pay attention to this influence of meta-language on Chinese L2 learners.

It is a great step forward if teachers can allow learners to understand the meanings of the two broad types of tenses and their differences in teaching Chinese learners. For more advanced learners, teachers can give them additional information on conditionals, for example, inversion, ellipsis, negative, and the overlap between conditionals and concessive. This can further their understanding.

Conclusion

This article has outlined the issues involved in the explanations of English conditionals, explored the difficulties of Chinese learners and provided some pedagogical implications for teaching conditionals. The successful teaching of conditionals is only a small step towards the development of teaching methodology specifically for Chinese L2 learners, because apart from learning just one grammatical item (i.e., conditionals), Chinese learners are facing a lot of difficulties in learning other grammatical aspects. It is hoped that by increasing their awareness of the influences of the Chinese language in the learning of English, teachers can understand the difficulties of Chinese learners and subsequently develop teaching methodology which are suitable for their learners.

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