MODAL VERBS AND INFINITIVE TENSES: A METHOD TO DEAL WITH CONFUSION

After such a long time in the teaching profession, I am becoming more and more convinced that how you teach grammar is determined by so many different factors that there are no hard and fast rules. It primarily depends on the teacher’s formal education, his/her mastery of the students’ mother tongue, the students’ grammar skills in general and the teacher’s ability to adapt their teaching to different individuals’ or groups’ needs.

Teaching grammar, like language in general, is a trial-and-error process which is constantly readapted but never finalized: only the end of teaching puts an end to it.

I will illustrate my point with an example. An area which is particularly difficult for Greek learners of English is modal verbs and infinitive tenses in English.

I normally make a point of presenting the tenses of the infinitive before I teach the Third Conditional. My reason for this is that you can’t teach the Past Conditional if you don’t break it down to its constituent parts. And its constituent parts are not would + have + Past Participle. (I find this approach too mechanical and not paying off in the long run.) Its constituent parts are would + Present Perfect Infinitive. It is very easy for students to make the mistake of changing “have” to “has” when a third person singular subject precedes the modal.

X He might has stolen the money.

In order to anticipate this kind of mistake I explain to the students that the form “have stolen” is the present perfect infinitive, which is not conjugated.

In Modern Greek the infinitive form is only used to form the perfect tenses, and most students do not even realize it is the infinitive. In Modern Greek we normally present a new verb in the first person singular of the Present Tense (there is only one present form).

However, most Greek students are familiar with the infinitive form in Ancient Greek as this is formally taught in Secondary school. The infinitive in Ancient Greek can be found in the Present, Past, Future and Present Perfect Tense.

So I often draw a parallel between the infinitive in Ancient Greek and in English to hammer it home to the students that

1.    the infinitive does not change

2.    the infinitive has tenses

In order to explain how we use modal verbs to express modes of “possibility”, “deduction” and so on, I break a sentence into parts: we find the part which allows us to think of the correct modal verb and then we spot the verb form which will be transferred to an infinitive tense. We decide on the tense of the infinitive depending on whether the verb form is in the present or past and then form the appropriate tense of the infinitive. Following this we put the pieces together so as to form the sentence.

Perhaps	he knows the truth
may	know
He may know the truth
There is no doubt	she missed her train.
must	have missed
She  must have missed her train
She is not studying	and it is wrong.
be studying	should
She should be studying.
It is just not possible	that he was driving at around that time
couldn’t	have been driving
He couldn’t have been driving at around that time.