As you start to learn more about your students and about how they use grammar, you might realize they are not making errors described as typical for ELLs. One explanation is that they haven’t yet learned to produce certain structures. That is, they can’t mix up verb tenses in a conditional sentence if they don’t know how to produce a conditional sentence.

This week you will learn the types of difficulties ELLs may have with nouns, conditionals, and modals. You will also explore the contexts in which your learners should be able to use these grammatical structures. Modals, for example, might help them make polite requests of their teachers and classmates.