 Hello. In this unit we're going to be looking at modal auxiliary verbs. What are modal auxiliary verbs? Well, if I was to draw something such as this, it's quite clearly a chair. And we can make a simple sentence to convey that point. It's a chair. What if we were to use the simple classroom dictionary game, where students have to guess what you're drawing. What about this? It could be a ball. It might be the sun. I was to draw a second circle. It might be a pair of glasses. It could be a stereo radio. If I was to continue, you would say it must be a bicycle. These words that I've boxed, might, could and must, are called modal auxiliary verbs. They express the speaker's feeling or attitude towards this particular verb, in this case the verb to be, and they're very subjective. In the English language, there are nine true modal auxiliary verbs. Will, would, should, might, may, must, can and could. There are other modal modals as well. These are called semi-modals. We've been looking at the difference between true modal auxiliary verbs and semi-modals briefly a little bit later on in this presentation. What are the main usages for the modal auxiliary verbs? Well, in this unit we'll look at eleven of the major usages of modal auxiliary verbs. Let's have a look at an example of each. So ability, for example, I can ride a bicycle. It's expressing my ability to ride a bicycle. Advice. Say to a friend that's ill, you should go to see a doctor with that. Deduction. Somebody comes in, they're soaking wet. It must be raining outside, because he's soaking wet. They're deducing that it's wet outside, but you don't actually know. Obligation. You obliged to do something. I must finish this report by tomorrow morning. What about an offer? Would you like anything to drink? Permission. May I leave work early today? Can I leave work early today? Could I leave work early today? And possibility. You can take a train from London to Manchester. You can buy tickets at the door or in advance. Now, you've noticed already we're using can here for ability and can for possibility. We're using must for obligation. We're using must for deduction. So the usages are interchangeable. Let's have a look. Prediction. I think my team will win the league. I don't know that my team will win the league, but I'm predicting that they will. Prohibition. You mustn't smoke in here. Promise. What do people say when they get married? I will always love you. And finally, a request. Could you help me with this? There are many, many more usages, but these are the most common usages that you will find that you're requested to teach when you're teaching English as a foreign language. So let's have a look at how we might approach teaching the modal auxiliary verb can. Start level students. Initially, we introduced the word can in the context of ability. Going back to our earlier example, I can ride a bike. She can swim. You can speak English. And then as we progress through the levels, we'll introduce further usages of the same word. Typically for an elementary level student, possibility would be the next usage that is introduced. For example, you can see a movie in a cinema. It's possible to do it. It's not about ability. Then as you progress, further usages will be introduced, such as permission. Such as a request. So permission. Can I smoke in here? A request. Can you help me with that? The board line between usages for permission and request is quite a grey area. But nevertheless, the two are slightly different. The final usage that would be introduced might be advice. You can go to see a doctor with that. It's a very, very weak form of advice. Suggesting that somebody does go to have something looked at, but it's completely their choice. Let's have a look at another way that we could approach teaching modal auxiliary verbs. One other approach that could be used to teach modal auxiliary verbs is in context. So for example, how to give advice for students of a higher level that have some knowledge of the various modal auxiliary verbs. It's more appropriate to teach in this way. So talking about ways to give advice, we could start with you should go to see a doctor as a typical average way to advise somebody to do something. If the advice was a little bit weaker than that, you could go to see a doctor. It's not important that you do, but there's some advice given there. Even weaker than that, as the one we looked at a little bit earlier on briefly, you can go to see a doctor if you want to. Any particular need to. And an even stronger way of giving advice, you must go to see a doctor with that. Some extremely strong advice. And the strongest of all, perhaps when parents are disciplining children, you will go to see the doctor with that. So you can see that there are two main ways of approaching teaching modal auxiliary verbs. One is by selecting one modal auxiliary and one usage and focusing on that in that particular context. Any other way when you get to teach high level students is to choose a context such as advice. And then use each of the most appropriate modal auxiliary verbs in a different way to show how the different modal auxiliary verbs can be used for various other usages, not just the most apparent one. Right, let's now have a look at difficulties that students have when learning modal auxiliary verbs. Modal auxiliary verbs present specific problems for both teachers and learners, quite apart from the numerous difficulties associated with the myriad of usages that there are. And the combination of which modal verbs can be used for which usage. There are difficulties also with the structure of sentences. For example, forming a negative. Usually we use the auxiliary do with most lexical verbs, but with modal auxiliary verbs we don't. So for example, I don't like swimming. We do not. There's a verb like. When modal auxiliary verbs are initially introduced, students may find it puzzling that we don't use this structure. Instead, we use this structure. Another difficulty is in forming questions and interrogatives. In a similar way, we use the auxiliary verb do to form questions. But this isn't the case with modal auxiliary verbs. Do you can swim? Is incorrect. We form questions by inversion. Can you swim? Another basic problem for students of the language is forming positive sentences in the third person singular. He likes swimming. He can swims. He swims. Yes. The introduction of the modal auxiliary can. S is omitted. He can swim. Let's have a look at a couple of other problems for students. One more difficulty that students have trouble with is when we start to introduce what we referred to at the beginning of the presentation, which is semi modal auxiliary verbs. An example of a semi modal auxiliary verb need to. Let's look at the structure of sentences when we use a semi modal auxiliary, such as need to. I need to work every day. Just reflect on what we discussed earlier on about true modal auxiliary verbs where they don't change their form. If we use the pronoun he, in this case we do add an s. To make a negative, I don't need to work every day. So in this instance we do use the auxiliary do. The same with forming a question, do you need to work every day? Again, we're using the auxiliary do. There's one more difficulty that we'll look at in this session. Another point that students find difficult to grasp is that they have no tense. Modal auxiliary verbs have no tense. To express tense or time, and bear in mind they're not the same thing, you have to use or adapt the main verb. Some modals can't be used to talk about the past or the future. Let's have a look at this sentence. You must be in class by 9.30 every day. That's an obligation, a regular obligation, the present obligation for something that you need to do regularly. If you want to talk about the past, students might initially feel that you could write a sentence like this. You must work in class by 9.30 every day to express an obligation in the past. That is not the case. You might think that one was a way of approaching that could be, you must have been in class by 9.30 every day. That is not an obligation, that's a deduction. So the modal auxiliary must, in this case, couldn't be used to talk about an obligation in the past. In this case you would use then a semi-modal hat to be in class by 9.30 every day. Hat to is an expression of obligation in the past. Let's just have a look one more time at the difficulties with semi-modals using hat to as another example. You must be in class, change the u to he, the must stays the same. You have to be in class, you change the he, have to changes to, have to. In this session we've covered the essential points required for you to teach modal auxiliary verbs but always consult any materials that are appropriate to your specific teaching point. Because as you may well have picked up, what initially appears to be quite a simple structure using the 9 true modal auxiliary verbs can have difficulties for a lot of students when they first start to learn these and then once you start to introduce the semi-modal auxiliaries the difficulties can only increase. So always be fully prepared for any difficulties that are potentially there in your lesson. Now let's have a look at the active and passive voice. We have a typical sentence here. George Orwell wrote Animal Farm. This sentence is in the active voice. Now Animal Farm is in the final position of the sentence. We could rewrite the sentence to have the exact same meaning, the exact same tense but bring Animal Farm to the first position within a sentence. What I'd like for you to do is pause the DVD, have a go at wording the rest of the sentence so that the tense does not change nor does the meaning. When you're ready, press play and we'll look at the final sentence. Let's have a look at what you've got. Does it match with this sentence here? Animal Farm was written by George Orwell. If so, pat yourself on the back and let's look at what has actually been done. First, George Orwell, he's the doer of the action. He's the subject here. Then we have our verb, rote, which is in the past simple form. Now we have our object. It is the thing that received the action. This is again the active voice. In this sentence here, Animal Farm was written by George Orwell. Now we've turned an active sentence into a passive sentence. We've taken our object, Animal Farm, and put it into the first position of the sentence. Now we have our auxiliary verb to be also in the past simple form. Key to making this transition is keeping the auxiliary verb to be into the same tense as the active tense. Now we have our past participle form of the verb, rote, goes to written. And then we can follow it up by adding to the statement, Animal Farm was written, finishing it with by George Orwell, the subject. After looking at how we change active to passive sentences, let's take a try at doing these four sentences in various tenses. We've got, my uncle is designing our new kitchen, the gardener has pruned the bushes, we will prosecute trespassers, and the police caught the thief last night. Now pause your video, have a go at these four sentences, changing them from the active to the passive voice. When you're ready, begin the DVD again. Well let's have a look and see how we did. The original sentence here, my uncle is designing our new kitchen, should have changed to, our new kitchen is being designed by my uncle. A good way to start the analysis is to look at the tense. This sentence is written in the present continuous form, so we know that our auxiliary verb needs to stay in that tense, is being. Our verb has changed to the past participle. We've moved our object to the subject position, and our subject is in the final position. Resulting in, our new kitchen is being designed by my uncle. Now the gardener has pruned the bushes. Again, we need to look at the tense, which is present perfect. We change it to the passive voice and it becomes, the bushes have been pruned, and if we so choose, we could add by the gardener. We don't have to, but we could stop there. Again, it's the same tense in the present perfect, have been. The main verb has been switched back to the past participle form. Our object of the sentence has gone into the subject position, and we've added the original subject if we so choose. Now we have, we will prosecute trespassers. It's written in the future simple tense. This is reflected in, will be, we've changed prosecute to prosecuted, and we've taken our object and put it into the subject position, and because it's assumed, there is no need to finish the sentence. Now, the police caught the thief last night. We have past simple. We've taken our object and moved it to the subject position. We've kept the past simple form of the verb to be. We've moved it, the main verb to the past participle form and still ended our sentence with last night. One of the main issues for your students will be ensuring that the auxiliary verb to be is conjugated into the same exact tense as the active voice sentence. Here, we've taken a look at four of the tenses. There are additional tenses to be analyzed. They're in your materials, and in addition to that, there are some exercises for you to have a chance and practice on in your own. We use the passive voice for the following reasons. When the agent is unknown, a man was murdered last night. Who murdered the man? We don't know. When the agent is unimportant, the house was built in 1950. Who built the house? We don't really care. When we want to change the focus, Macbeth was written by Shakespeare. Rather than focusing on Shakespeare who wrote Macbeth, we want to focus on Macbeth, the story. Finally, we use it when we want to conceal the agent. Rather than telling the identity of somebody, we might just say, I was told you stole my money. A teaching idea for the passive voice could be something such as this palminism or matching game. Here, we have different sentences, half of which are written in the active voice, half of which are written in the passive voice. The idea will be for the students to turn one of each over and identify whether or not they match each other. So, of course, the cards will be facedown and a student might turn over the mice are being eaten by snakes as well as the snakes were eating mice. Of course, these sentences don't match and the students would turn the cards back over. The next student might turn over the mice were being eaten by snakes as well as the snakes were eating mice. The students would know that those two cards match and take them off the board. The game would continue until all the cards were taken off the board. Let's just have a quick recap of the passive voice. Here we can see in our example sentence a crocodile ate Henry. This is what we call the active voice. It has the order, subject, plus verb, plus object. Crocodile being the subject, the verb in the past tense, ate, and then Henry as the object. This is what we call the active voice. This sentence can also be expressed in the passive voice. So, as we can see here, Henry was eaten by a crocodile. This now takes a different structure. Henry, who was the original object of the sentence, is now in subject position. We've added the verb to be here in the past tense to match the original example. And then we've taken our main verb and put it instead of the past tense, ate into the past participle, eaten. We have then introduced the original subject of the sentence with the word by. So our original sentence, a crocodile ate Henry, becomes Henry was eaten by a crocodile. The main problem for students using the passive voice is to put the verb to be into the correct tense. In our example here, the crocodile ate Henry, that's in the past simple tense. And the verb to be in the passive voice sentence has to match that tense. So, in the past simple verb to be is was or were here. Henry was eaten by a crocodile. Likewise, if we use the present simple, a crocodile eats Henry. We have to use the verb to be in the present simple. Henry is eaten by a crocodile. We can also see here, a crocodile is eating Henry. That is the present continuous tense. And to put it in a passive voice, we then have to say Henry is being eaten by a crocodile. The present perfect tense. A crocodile has eaten Henry. Henry has been eaten by a crocodile. And so on. We can see that the sentences pretty much stay the same. The only thing changing here is the verb to be changing into the correct form to match the original sentence. The passive voice is particularly used when the doer of an action or the subject of an action is unknown, such as a man was murdered last night. We don't know who committed the action. The passive is also used when the doer or subject of the action is not important. For example, my house was built 10 years ago. It's not important to the meaning of the sentence who built it. The passive voice is also used to shift the focus from the original subject to the object. If we look back to our original sentence, a crocodile ate Henry. The focus is on the crocodile. It was a crocodile ate Henry, not a tiger or a lion. When we move this to the passive voice, we've moved the focus away from the crocodile and on to Henry. When asked how to form the passive voice, a summary of the difference in structure between the active and the passive will be sufficient. When changing sentences from the active to passive voice, please reference the chart in your materials and focus again on the structure of the sentences. When writing the active voice, remember that there must be an agent or a doer of the action. Here, it's important to note that a country itself cannot do the action, but rather its citizens do the action. Again, when asked to explain to a low-level learner, we want to word our answer exactly as we would as if we were speaking to the low-level learner and not our tutor.