a summary of material on Teaching English Modals

Function	Presentation ideas	Practice ideas
Requests	- Prep a scene with 1 person constantly borrowing stuff from another (2 students /friends?) “Could I borrow a pen?”, “Could I have a piece of paper?”, etc.	- Give pairs picture cards that suggest requests (tea cup, closed window, heavy box.) Pairs make and respond to requests. - Sts in a café. A is an annoying customer with constant requests. B is the waitress/waiter.
Offers	- Using classroom materials, demonstrate possible offers you can make: “Can I bring you a dictionary?” or “Can I open the door for you?” Each idea can be sketched on the board.	- Sts in a café. A is a customer who just wants coffee and quiet. B is an annoying waitress/waiter who keeps making new offers. - Card game with problems and solutions; A says problem; B must offer a polite solution.
Permission	- Convey that you are a thirsty student. How can you ask to get water? OR, get permission to answer an urgent call, etc.	- In pairs, at a border crossing. A is the customs officer; B is a traveler. A stops B to ask many polite questions.
Ability	- Prep a survey about abilities, 10 questions - Mime different abilities. Elicit or give the question and answer forms.  - Students write a report about a classmate’s ability	- Medical check-up: prepare a set of questions for students to ask each other as part of their visit to the doctor. Then they can add more questions. (This can be adapted for future and past uses.) - Describe an animal’s ability (give pics?)
Obligation / Compulsion / Advice	Draw or project common road signs. Elicit their meaning, helping to correct their forms.	- Have sts create a new sign for their study or living area. - Ask sts to write ideas of ways they can solve their life problems (debt, being unfit, oversleeping).
Possibility / Certainty	- Show a picture of a street with imminent events; ask “What might happen in the next 2 minutes?” - Use a video still to have sts predict what will happen next; then play the video.	- bring a box with unusual, interesting, and/or noisy items in it; ask what it might be used for; whom it might be used by; when… - show a pic of a business meeting with an empty chair; why is the chairwoman late? - guess the jobs of a series of people in pictures - Show the 7 Ancient Wonders; what must have been true about these places and their builders?
Regret		•Think of a trip that you took in the past. What are some things that you wish you did/didn’t do? –Tried local food, visited historical sites, enjoyed the night life, learned the official language,   –I could have gone zip lining when I visited Las Vegas.  I shouldn’t have bought KFC when I was in Nigeria (link)

*Most of these ideas from Scrivener, along with Celce-Murcia.

Other Key Points to Teach:
· “[V]irtually all the modals can express both logical probability and social interaction.” (Celce-Murcia, 141)
o The historical past is a way of softening requests that will help learners practically. (145)
· Both Celce-Murcia and Scrivener implicitly suggest in their formats that an overview of all of the modals may be helpful to students eventually.
· The presentation of functions might include a line that indicates the strength of the various modals in both positive and negative forms.

Three Sources for Teaching Modals
Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Diane Larsen-Freeman. The Grammar Book. 2nd ed. Heinle and Heinle, 1999.
Scrivener, Jim. Teaching English Grammar. Macmillan, 2010
Seven, Rüstem and Özge Seven. Türkçe ve İngilizce Açıklamalı English Grammar. n.d.

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Modals of Probability, positive and negative forms

In their chapter on modals, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman talk about teaching both the functions of the positive and negative forms. They also show how different modals often work within a single function. The content below is taken from their work, The Grammar Book, but it is displayed in a fresh way. This idea should be expandable to the other modal functions, and it could be expanded to show additional aspects of modality, like adverbials or vocab like "dare."