Random thoughts
Today I was going to do modals in the past. You know, could have, should have + participle focussing on regrets. I started off with a quick personal story and asked about what they understood as "regret". We elicited a few ideas and then they asked about how to use the word regret, and I found myself explaining verb patters instead of modal auxiliaries. Bad class management or one more example of how interraleted things are in English? of how hard it is to teach certain things in isolation regret as a grammar word with a certain pattern and regret as a human feeling and how to talk about past events you are not happy about?
of how easily we can divert focus onto sth else because you can't learn x outside/without y when learners can already speak English and have been exposed to a lot of English and acquired bad habits ?
Then, this same class (two mums and two childless women) steered into giving advice. Great! modals! One of the mums asked for advice about her eldest daughter. But what happened was that advice was given but not a single modal verb used, no woulds, shoulds, or coulds...
It's true that I've left it drift this way today, intentionally, aware of what I was doing but to me, this shows that even if you insist on the uses of modals, try to create fairly authentic conversations in which they should try to use the target language, natural communication prevails , more than the willingness to learn. Therefore, what I teach feels a bit theoretical, to be understood more than to be used when spoken to, when they read. It's hard to deconstruct, to break word by word ways translation in front of fluent students (as opposed to accurate ones).
