LUCRARE METODICO-STIINTIFICA PENTRU OBTINEREA GRADULUI DIDACTIC I - Teaching the Future to Romanian Learners of English (Upper-Intermediate & Advanced Levels)

UNIVERSITATEA BUCURESTI, FACULTATEA DE LIMBI SI LITERATURI STRAINE

LUCRARE METODICO-STIINTIFICA PENTRU OBTINEREA GRADULUI DIDACTIC I

Teaching the Future to Romanian Learners of English  

(Upper-Intermediate & Advanced Levels)

Contents:

I INTRODUCTION – the reason why I chose this particular subject for my paper.

II A THEORETICAL APPROACH OF THE SUBJECT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FUTURE TENSES

II.1 Old English

II.2 Middle English

II.3 Early Modern English (from the 16^th up to the 20^th century)

III MEANS OF EXPRESSING FUTURITY IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

III.1 Introduction. A description of the concepts of time /tense.

III.2 The Romanian view of futurity

III.3The English paradigm

III.4 Alternative Devices for Expressing Futurity

III.5 Overall description of the future forms, in point of meanings and uses

III.6 Futurity in complex sentences

IV METHODS, STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING/ TEACHING

IV.1 What does “learning” mean? Introduction

IV.2 A brief survey of the trends before the 20^th century

IV.3 20^th Century Approaches to Language Teaching

V ACTIVITIES DESIGNED TO PRACTISE FUTURITY

VI CONCLUSIONS

VII REFERENCE (bibliography and webliography)
I INTRODUCTION

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a

scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean

– neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you CAN make

words mean so different things.’

(Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)

The aim of this paper is to give a helpful account of lexical and grammatical devices with future reference, both in English and Romanian, in a contrastive and functional approach, so that the similarities and the differences - in perceiving and relating to the concept of time and linguistically rendering them in the two languages - could be properly coped with by the Romanians when using English as a communicative tool (Ch. II and III).

First of all, the assumption that Romanian learners of English could experience difficulties in understanding and producing utterances with future time reference is obviously true, given 1) the general opinion that natural languages are immensely complicated structures, embodying meaning(s) in highly intricate manners which are different from one language to another. This is also my personal finding during my experience as a teacher, which is 2) the second compelling reason why I chose to tackle the concept of futurity functionally; the Romanian speakers of English, (students of any level), encountered difficulties in understanding to which extent a certain modal-auxiliary is either a grammatical instrument (auxiliary) or a modal verb with specific status and function in the context (e.g. WILL, SHALL, WOULD, SHOULD), especially in secondary clauses (conditional and temporal ones). Or, they find it difficult to go deeper into their mother tongue and see that the same tense, for instance, Future/Present Indicative (Viitor/Prezent Indicativ) can convey extra meanings, apart from the mere anchorage at a certain moment on the time axis. (Not only does this tense refer to activities/states in the future, but it also adds an extra-quantity of meaning, such as speaker’s attitude, promises, threats, which are not always formally/overtly instantiated, but very frequently inferred). This is precisely the point where Romanian learners of English get lost in the multitude of linguistic means of relating to the future concept in English (and therefore become inefficient in expressing whatever they need to), as the Romanian language is not so much focused on the semantics of moods and tenses, not to say on function, as English is, the result being a reduced number of grammatical devices involved in producing meaning and function. The following examples give an account of such differences:

1)Cerul e intunecat. Va ploua. vs

2)Te voi ajuta/Te ajut eu sa scrii eseul.

in which 1) is a future assumption based on present evidence, the English counterpart being ‘Going to’ Future,

1)The sky is dark with clouds. It is going to rain.

and 2) is a promise, simple future being used here exclusively,

2)I’ll help you to write your essay.

There is, however, a mention to be made when dealing with futurity, linguistically speaking: not only does this paper intend to describe English and Romanian future tenses, it also takes into account other grammatical or lexical ways with future reference – instances when modality adds to this and, even a bit more complicated, secondary clauses on which the sequence of tenses constraints are imposed; nor can it draw a clear line between the auxiliary values of words like WILL/SHALL, WOULD/SHOULD and their modal content, as there are very few contexts in which they are either one or the other (infra II1).

e.g. He’ll probably finish this project.

I will invite you to the next concert. (Is this volition - modal content, or a promise, a certain future activity, etc., therefore a future tense? If the first half of the question has a positive answer, then WILL is a modal verb, conveying ‘volition’, with present reference, the Romanian variant being: ‘Doresc/Vreau sa te invit la urmatorul concert.’ If, on the contrary, this is a future tense, then we are dealing with a wide range of extra-meanings not literally rendered, but it is a case of time/discourse deixis, that is the sentence gains the extra-meaning(s) from the context:

e.g.i Since I have two tickets and no one else likes classical music more than you, I’ll invite you to the next concert. [certainty]

ii Last time you got upset that I didn’t count you in, but I will invite you to the next concert. [a promise]

iii As I don’t have anyone else to assist me with the review, and nobody seems to offer to go, I will invite you to the concert. [decision]

iv If you don’t stop picking on me about not taking you to the last concert, which was awful, I’ll invite you to the next concert. You’ll have enough of it! [a kind of threat]

The time reference is clear, but the full meaning or the semantic value is clear only given a larger context as a background for decoding the utterance. Again, this is not only a problem of structure or grammar, but the attempt of setting the meaning(s) goes into the function/semantics of language, (that is, pragmatics), since a certain pattern does not necessarily and unambiguously convey a certain meaning in a smaller context, as seen in the example above, but in a larger one. Particularly this gives Romanian learners of English difficulties in translating/writing simple or complex texts or in using English in conversation. In order to picture a clearer image of the lexical or grammatical devices that have future time reference, starting with their functional role, a full account of these will be given, together with their Romanian counterparts, and how they appear in usage (in both written and spoken English) (Ch. III).

Secondly, this paper looks at various teaching models that influenced current teaching practice (Ch. IV). There will be short descriptions of five most frequently used (in the past or recent years) learning techniques: Grammar-translation, Audio-lingualism, PPP (Presentation, Practice and Production), Task-Based Learning and Communicative Language Teaching. The subsequent part of this paper (Ch. IV) will deal with examples of class activities, designed from the perspective of the above mentioned learning methods/techniques, covering all skills: writing, reading, listening and speaking.

The last part of the paper will contain lesson plans on the subject, the conclusions I reached while researching for and writing this paper, and bibliographical and webliographical references.

II A THEORETICAL APPROACH OF THE CONCEPT

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC DEVICES RENDERING FUTU-RITY

‘Historical development proceeds not by stages,

but by overlaps.’ (Wrightson 2002: 24)

INTRODUCTION: PERIODS OF THE ENGISH LANGUAGE

As with every natural language, English has been greatly altered during the centuries. Research in this field divided its history into three major periods:

Ø     Old English (before c. 1100)

Ø     Middle English (c.1100-1500)

Ø     Modern English (after c. 1500)

Many historians divide the Modern English period into Early and Late Modern English,

with a dividing line set around 1700. In An Introduction to Early Modern English, Terttu Nevalainen, a professor of History of English in the Universities of Helsinki and Cambridge, gives a fragment in the Bible (Genesis 1:3), in three translations, each dating different centuries, to sustain the legitimacy of dividing English into the three periods of evolution.[1]

II.1 THE OLD ENGLISH PERIOD (the Anglo-Saxon)

The Anglo-Saxon, like all the Teutonic languages, had but two tenses: the present and the preterite. The uses of these two tenses are far more limited now than it was before the 11^th century. However, they are still employed today bearing future reference in certain linguistic contexts. Utterances like ‘I’m visiting my grandma next weekend’ or ‘Tomorrow is Monday,’ and many others, are common in present speech as well as in writers’ works.

It is to be noted that neither willan ‘will’, nor sæeal ‘shall’ has the meaning of futurity as they have today, except in the occasional, and rather literal, translation of the Latin future. E.g.:

These examples are interpreted as expressing necessity with future implications, in much the same way the present-day modal ‘shall’ does. Yet, in reported speech, there are examples which do not look as if they are a copy of the Latin language and in which sæeolde “should” represents a form of the Future-in-the-past.[2]

Simultaneously, the two forms of what appear today as auxiliaries of future tenses ‘shall’, ‘will’ were employed, but carrying certain meanings and not serving as pure grammatical instruments in forming tenses as they are claimed to be doing today: ic sceal meaning ‘I am obliged to’, and ic wille meaning ‘I wish to’. The two forms have never lost their connotation of obligation and desire respectively, therefore their grammaticalisation is not complete , (in an Old English clause, therefore, such as ‘Ic wille þone hlaford ofslēan’ ‘I want to kill the lord’, wille is a lexical verb which implies volition as well as futurity but today their main function is to signal futurity or prediction, among many others, quality which they developed in the Middle English period.

II.2 THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

Between the 11^th and the end of the 15^th centuries, futurity was rendered by the use of a smaller number of linguistic devices, but the partial overlapping of the grammatical and modal, thus lexical, functions of WILL/SHALL is easily perceptible even from those times then.

The verbs schal and - to a certain extent - wil (wol) were now frequently used to denote a future action, even if their meanings from OEP (Old English Period) were not lost completely - volition and obligation, respectively - (nor are they today):

E.g. ‘Ther-as the knightes weren in prisoun, of whiche I tolde yow, and

tellen shall

In some contexts, they can have a modal meaning as well, especially wil:

E.g. Our sweete Lord God of hevene wole that we comenalle to the

knowleche of Hym..

[Our sweet Lord God of heaven wishes that we all come to know-

ledge of him]

E.g. he shal first biwaylen the synnes that he has doon

[he must first bewail the sins that he has done]

However, it could be argued that they are used simply as future auxiliaries or as modal verbs exclusively, as the idea of volition or obligation implies futurity, thus, the development towards the future time auxiliary status is not a dramatic grammatical change.

Even in the literature of the time it became obvious that the two (shall/will) started developing their main function – to signal prediction, futurity:

E.g. ‘I shal myself to herbes techen yow

That shul been for youre heele and for youre preow.’,

says a character in one of Chaucer’s poems. Here, shal is singular (OE sceal) and shul is plural (OE sculon), and the meaning of the sentence is ‘I shall myself direct you to herbs that will be for your health and benefit’. The tendency of using shall for the first person and will for the second and third, when using these words as simple markers of the future, is quite recent and not universal even today: in Northern England one can often hear ‘Shall you go?’, where a Londoner will say ‘Will you go?’.

A future reference was also expressed periphrastically by ben aboute (for) to, followed by infinitive:

E.g. ‘Thou wouldest falsly ben aboute to love my lady.

along with the present tense inherited from OEP.[5]

II.3 EARLY MODERN ENGLISH (from the 16^th to the 20^th century)

As far as the future is concerned, the weakened meaning of shall and will was more obvious than it had been in Middle English,

E.g. ‘He that questioneth much, shall learn much.’ (Francis bacon, Essays)

E.g. ‘I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand than he shall get on his neck.’ (Shakespeare, Henry IV, part II).

Up to the beginning of the 17^th century there were no differences in use between will and shall for expressing the future, the first mention to these delimitations of use and meaning being made by George Mason , who noted the supplementary volitional content of will when used in any person and the use of shall in the first person especially.

The signs of the future are shall or will, but they shouldn’t be used indiscriminately: since if you use the sign shall when will should be used, it will sound improper and it will seem as if you are speaking too audaciously: for example, you could say appropriately If I doe eate that, I shall be sicke, ‘If I eat that, I shall be sick’, instead, if you said I will be sicke, it will seem as if you willingly wish to be sick; similarly, you could say: I hope you will be my good friend, If you doe that, you shall bee beaten or chidden, ‘If you do that, you shall be beaten or chidden’, but I shall not, but you shall not chuse, ‘but you shall not choose,’ that is to say, it will not be your choice: To be short, it is not easy to give a fixed rule, therefore I refer you to usage, and in order to understand it better, we shall propose the conjugation of certain verbs.’ (Mason, G., pages 25-26)

By the end of the Early Modern English period, many of the grammatical structures and terms familiar to us had found their place in the grammars of the time. In 1653, John Wallis wrote his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae in which he stated the rules of shall and will, according to which these two devices served to indicate the future (prediction), shall being used in the first person and will in the second and third person. [7]

A few decades later, Cooper made an even clearer distinction between shall and will, stating that shall in the first person expresses declaration, while with the other persons it conveys an order.

In the latter half of the 17^th century, the construction be going to developed a special meaning indicating future time. The process is thought to have started aound 1600, but there is only one example from Shakespeare , according to Jespersen, (apud Ioana Stefanescu, English Morphology, 2^nd Volume, Bucuresti, 1988, page 305). Present continuous, too, started to take on the new meaning. It is an example of grammaticalisation, a process in which lexical material becomes fixed in grammatical function. In present-day English, the former expression has grammaticalised even further, being reduced to gonna (we’re gonna be there).

E.g. S^r John Walter is going to be marryed to my Lady Stoel, w^ch will be very happy for him. (H.C., Anne Hatton, 1695, page 214)

During this period, will started to gain ground in the first person, while being used in parallel with shall, the appearance of the new structures (going to and be to) having little (if any) influence over the use of the two modal-auxiliaries. As for the old device employed for conveying futurity (the present tense simple), this was too still in use, when the future event contained a high degree of certainty[10]:

Nowadays, English has a wide range of ways of referring to the future, each and every one of them having not only grammatical, but semantic or functional values, as well, which will be dealt with in II2.

III MEANS OF EXPRESSING FUTURITY IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH

III.1 Introduction

To begin with, I am going to cite the definition given by the authors of ‘A Grammar of Contemporary English’, R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik, to the idea of time/tense: ‘ in abstraction from any given language, time can be thought as a line (theoretically, of infinite length) on which is located, as a continuously moving point, the present moment. Anything ahead of the present moment is in the future, and anything behind it is in the past. []

THE PRESENT MOMENT

PAST FUTURE

[now]

Figure The representation of the concept of time

This is an interpretation of past, present and future on a REFERENTIAL level. []

(page 175)

[] we distinguished past, present and future also on a SEMANTIC level. On this second level of interpretation, then, ‘present’ is the most general and unmarked category’ as a statement constructed with the present simple can be applicable to present, past and future, while the past tense has a more restricted applicability:

E.g. John spends a lot of money. (true for past, present, and future)

E.g. John spent a lot of money. (true for past only)

Like most grammarians, the authors of this grammar do not accept the future as a formal category, since, morphologically, English does not have verb inflection for such a category, but they accept the idea of ‘grammatical constructions capable of expressing the semantic category of FUTURE’. One reason for sustaining this, is the lack of inflection for such a category, the present and the past being morphologically marked (-s/-es, for the 3^rd person singular, present simple and -ed, for all persons in past simple, respectively), if tenses are defined as forms of the verb.

Another reason for admitting the existence of only two tenses in English derives from the diachronic perspective of the phenomenon of futurity, in that future reference was carried out during middle English not only by the present tenses, but by the subjunctive mood, as well. This leads to the reconsideration of the concept of mood itself, as it has been perceived both in English and Romanian so far. In the recently issued (2005) Grammar of the Romanian Language, «Modurile personale (predicative) sunt ansambluri de forme verbale care se incadreaza in categoria modalizatorilor, adica a acelor expresii lingvistice care redau implicarea vorbitorului in enunt. [] In gramaticile curente, modurile verbale sunt caracterizate pe baza opozitiei real~posibil (nonreal): Indicativul exprima procese reale, conditionalul, conjunctivul, imperativul si prezumtivul redau procese posibile (nonreale). […] vorbitorul poate sa prezinte procesul ca fictiv (“contrafactual”), ca probabil (“nonfactual”) sau ca sigur (“factual”).»[13] The same work gives account of the Indicative mood as the finite mood that consists of both synthetic and analytical forms which render information about the anchorage in time of the communicated processes and about the “real”=factual content of the utterance. The certainty associated with this mood becomes debatable when referring to the future time reference utterances or the whole debate moves the matter into the modality – pragmatics – functional grammar area. To say nothing about the fallacy of the assumption that the Indicative mood satisfies the truth-cond 747c29h itional requirement/principle which any factual = ‘real’ utterance has to fulfil.

On the other hand, English linguistic studies and dictionaries define ‘mood’ as being ‘any one of the groups of forms in the conjugation of a verb that serve to show the mode or manner by which the action denoted by the verb is represented’ , or ‘different forms of the verb used according to whether a fact or hypothesis was being expressed’ , or ‘finite verb phrases .] which indicate the factual, nonfactual, or counterfactual status of the predication’.[18] The distinction is too coarse to describe the nature and functions of the moods and, implicitly, of the tenses English employs in communicating, as it will be shown below.

There is another aspect that should be mentioned: the main constructions used to express futurity, especially the so-called shall/will forms, bear various modal nuances which the other two time frames, the present and past, respectively, do not possess at all. This is due to the fact that shall and will are modal/auxiliary verbs, that is, grammatical devices, used for building specific categories (such as tense) on the one hand, and semantic units, on the other, which means that they bring extra-information to the utterance, such as the attitude of the speaker towards their discourse, generally speaking; therefore, the discussion about the future tenses and the like overpasses the limitations of grammar seen as structure only, and is better unveiled by the theory of modality and speech acts (subsequently adopted as a new linguistic branch/study, Pragmatics), via semantics, as shown in the pie chart below:

Figure The threefold approach of the linguistic sign

The arrows connecting the three wedges of the pie illustrate the interconnectedness of the three dimensions; thus, a change in any wedge will have repercussions for the other two.

The wedge having to do with form/structure refers to those overt lexical and morphological forms that show how a particular grammar structure is constructed (Marianne Celce-Murcia, Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, page 252).

In the semantic wedge, we deal with what a grammar structure means, both lexically and grammatically (i.e. a dictionary definition of an auxiliary or the time adverbial clause states the moment when the action in the main clause takes place, etc. respectively.) In respect of the third wedge, the definition given by Levinson in Pragmatics, 1983, p.9, is the most appropriate explanation: “the study of those relations between language and context that are grammaticalised, or encoded in the structure of a language”.

The threefold approach of the ways of expressing futurity may be ascertained by asking the following question: Why and when does a speaker/writer choose a particular grammar structure over another that could express the same meaning or accomplish the same purpose? For example, what factors in the social context might explain a paradigmatic choice such as why a speaker chooses I shall come, too., rather than I will come, too.? or Will you do as I say, please? vs. Do as I say!, in which case an interrogative form is used instead of a plain imperative? One possible answer and with great teaching efficiency can be the rearrangement of this topic so that it meets the communicative needs of any Romanian learner of English, up to the upper-intermediate and advanced levels.

As for myself, I follow Vet’s view of the matter: ‘The Simple Future is like a mood in that it expresses the speaker’s attitude towards the future eventuality. It is a future tense because it places the eventuality posterior to the speech point.’[19]

III.2 The Romanian view of futurity

As mentioned in the first chapter, Romanian looks at the present topic rather ‘shyly’, in that it gives descriptions of the grammatical categories mostly from a formal point of view, overriding the functional/pragmatic aspect which can lead to a more accurate normative work. This mention needs asserting if one is viewing the matter from the pedagogical standpoint, as I am trying to do here.

As with any dictionary of linguistic terms or grammar, the Romanian linguists (especially those who revised and issued the older Gramatica Academiei -the Academy Grammar of Romanian, 2005) define tense referring to a linear continuum on which various events, states or actions anchor. Moreover, in order to render simultaneity, and, more complicated, anteriority and posteriority, a standpoint/point of reference is designated, that is the speech time (t₀), according to which processes are qualified as past, present or future:

«Tense is the grammatical category that indicates the anchorage of a process (action, event or state) in relation with the time of speech and that is instantiated under groups (sets) of verbal forms. In other words, grammatical tense gives account of the systematic correlations between verbal forms that the processes are rendered by and the communicative/speech situation. According to the interval within which the speech act occurs, the temporal semantic field is segmented into three areas: present (‘now’), past (‘so far’) and future (‘from now on’):

∞----------past----------} {---------future---------∞

Figure The semantic areas of the concept of time

The semantic areas represent the so-called Time Reference (TR) of the verbal forms.»[20]

The Romanian work cited above (and which is the leading voice concerning the Romanian grammar) refers to futurity within the Indicative mood, highlighting only a few of the wide range of possibilities of referring to processes subsequent to the moment of speaking. All forms that have such temporal reference are analytical, as their Germanic counterparts, including English and, oddly, unlike the other Romance languages that have inflectional future forms.

i) The first form with future reference described is the Proper Future (VIITORUL PROPRIU-ZIS) also named the Formal/Literary Future in an English account of the Romanian language , an analytical form formed by an affix: voi, vei, va, vom, veti, vor, (coming from a notional verb ‘a vrea’ = ‘to want’, the older ‘to will’), and the bare infinitive of the main verb. So far there is a striking resemblance in form to the English will-future, but the two languages go different ways in some points of function and usage (infra II2.3).

E.g. voi merge, vei merge, va merge, etc.

The second form employed by Romanian is an analytical form, as well, different from the previous one in point of register, as it is exclusively used either in informal/colloquial Romanian or in literary texts. This form consists of an affix - oi, ai, (ei, ii, oi), o, (a), om, ati (eti, iti, oti), or and the infinitive of the main verb.

E.g. oi merge, ai merge, o merge, om merge, etc.

Another construction used in romanian for referring to future processes is built with an affix ‘o’ and the subjunctive/conjunctive form of the verb. This variant is mostly used in colloquial Romanian.

E.g. O sa merg, o sa mergi, o sa mearga, etc.

The last variant of this tense comprises a combination of the present form of ‘a avea’ = ‘to have’ and the present subjunctive form of the main verb. This construction is very widely used both in formal and informal style.

E.g. am sa merg, ai sa mergi, are sa mearga, etc.

Most of the above mentioned forms, if not all, do not have a one-to-one relationship with the English forms, thus, the function and the particular meaning of each instantiation brings about a lexical-grammatical constraint when choosing the equivalent.

E.g. Nu stiu ce sa mai cred. Ieri a spus ca azi la ora 8 va fi aici (dar n-a

venit. (Future Indicative/ Viitor Indicativ)

[I don’t know what to think. Yesterday he said he would be here at 8

o’clock, (but he hasn’t come.) (Future-in-the-past, Indicative)

There is another special periphrastic compound, though, which expresses posteriority, as well, and which occurs in contexts with other verbs having past reference. This consists of the Indicative-imperfect form of ‘to have’ and the present conjunctive/subjunctive form of the verbs and is referred to as Viitorul in trecut (Future-in-the-past).

In referring to the content of these future time forms, the Romanian linguists identify three features: a temporal one [Posteriority towards a t₀], an aspectual one [- Perfective] and a modal characteristic [+ Real]. They are deictic tenses, as they refer to processes posterior to the time of the utterance, although there are many contexts in which some future forms, such as Viitorul in trecut (Future-in-the-past) are subsequent to a past time point of reference

E.g. «Abia atunci am realizat eu ca acest cantec avea sa imi schimbe oare-

cum viata.» (As, 2003) (Viitorul in trecut, Indicativ)

«It was not until then that I realized that song was going to change my

life to some extent.» (Past form of ‘Going to’ Future, Indicative)

E.g. «Ma intrebam numai daca din ele avea sa mi se dezvaluie vreodata

ceva.» (Mateiu Caragiale, Craii de Curtea Veche) (Viitor in trecut, in-

dicativ)

«I was only wandering whether I would ever be revealed something, if

anything.» (Future-in-the-past, Indicative)

A rather rich collection of deictic time phrases are associated with any of the future tenses described above. They are considered to be a) deictic intrinsically referential expressions’ (The A.G., page 443) and contribute to the anchorage of a process on the time axis: maine, poimaine, raspoimaine, (tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in three days’s time and their combinations, b) ’deictic relational expressions’, such as in cateva zile/clipe/minute etc, (in a few days’/minutes’/moments’ time de acum in doi/trei/zece ani (two/three/ten years from now); la pranz/noapte/vara/apusul soarelui etc. (at noon/tonight/this summer/at sunset in iarna/primavara/februarie/octombrie/2012/2016 etc (in winter/spring/February/October/2012/2016); in noaptea/primavara/luna/ vara viitoare etc. (tonight/next spring/month/summer).

Some other – dupa catva timp, dupa o zi/saptamana/trei luni, (after a while/a day/three months later), un an/secol/deceniu mai tarziu, etc., (a year/century/decade later), in acel moment/in acea clipa/zi/seara, etc., (in that moment/on that day/night) – function anaforically, as well as with past time reference tenses:

E.g. In 2004 s-a mutat to Londra. Dupa doi ani se va stabili in New York.

(Viitor, Indicativ)

[In 2004 he moved to London. Two years later, he would settle down

in New York.] (Future-in-the-past, Indicative)

vs.

In 2004 s-a mutat la Londra. Dupa un an s-a stability la New York.

(Perfect compus, Indicativ)

[In 2004 he moved to London. Two years later, he settled to New

York. (Past Simple, Indicative)

E.g. Mult mai tarziu micuta printesa avea sa afle ca ilustra bunica-poeta

nu fusese deloc fericita de casatoria nepotului ei []cu superba Ma-

ria.(As, 2003) (Viitor in trecut, Indicativ)

[Much later the little princess was to learn/would learn that her dis-

tinguished poetess-grandma wasn’t happy about her grandson’s

marriage to gorgeous Maria.] (As, 2003) (Past form of ‘be to’,

Indicative)

E.g. Va pleca in Franta in ianuarie. (Viitor I, Indicativ)

[She will/is going to leave/is leaving for France in January.]

(Will-future/‘Going to’ Future/Present Continuous, Indicative)

Vs.

E.g. A plecat in Franta in ianuarie. (Perfect compus, Indicativ)

[He left for France in January.] (Past Simple, Indicative)

In this respect, English is very much the same as Romanian. (Infra II2.3)

Another aspect that is worth mentioning when considering the temporal approach of the matter is the overlapping between the tense and other verbal functions, such as aspect, mood, etc., which leads to debates whether an example as the following refers to the future or has it an a-temporal meaning:

E.g. Intotdeauna luna se va invarti in jurul Pamantului.

The Moon will move round the Earth forever.

In both languages, the future forms refer not only to a subsequent period, but it states a general truth, which classifies its meaning as omni-temporal. For this reason linguists introduced an alternative terminology (e.g. ‘past’ vs. ’non-past’, ‘future’ vs. ’non-future’ or ‘present’ vs. ‘non-present’), to describe certain contexts where reality is described in absolute terms, the tenses losing their deictic features. Therefore, there are situations when the content of an utterance is not contextualized relative to a certain point on the time axis, but the proposition applies to any point on this axis. This again reshapes the relation between time and tenses.

Regarding the modal feature [+Real], the Romanian linguists describe the future forms introduced above as baring various modal nuances, ranging from tentativeness to absolute certainty:

Ø     Uncertainty, probability:

E.g. Nu stiu daca o veni maine la scoala. (Viitor popular, Indicativ)

[I don’t know/wonder whether he’ll come to school tomorrow

(Simple Future, Indicative)

Ø     Hopes, predictions whose degree of certainty is low:

E.g. Voi reveni mai tarziu (Viitor, Indicativ)

[I’ll return later.] (Simple Future, Indicative)

Ø     In conditional sentence, these forms render hypothesis, possibility, in which case it overlaps with other grammatical moods (Conditional optativ, Prezumtive):

E.g. Daca il voi intalni, ii voi spune. (Viitor, Indicativ)

[If I see him, I will tell him.] (Simple Present and Simple Future, respectively, Indicative)

ii) Another form with future reference is Viitorul anterior (cosidered to be the equivalent of the English Future Perfect). It is built with the same affixes as the Proper Future, types I and II – voi (oi), vei (ai, -i, ii), vom (om), veti (ati, eti, iti, oti), vor (or), the affix fi and the participle form of the verb.

E.g. eu v(oi) fi ras, tu vei (ai, ei, -i, ii) fi ras, el va (o, a) ras, etc.

The temporal content of this verbal form is situated after the moment of speaking (t₀) and before a certain limit in the future (t_x), gainins two features [+ Posteriority towards t₀] and [+ Anteriority towards t_x]. Another two features are associated with this form [+ Perfective/Perfect] and [+ Real],

E.g. Dupa ce voi fi incheiat lucrul, ma vei lasa sa te ajut? (Viitor anterior

and Viitor propriu-zis, Indicativ)

[After I have finished my work, will you let me help you?] (Present Per-

fect and Simple Future, Indicative due to the constraints of the tense se-

quence)

In Romanian, this form (Viitor Anterior) has a bookish/pedantic character, that is why its significance is usually conveyed by Viitor Propriu-Zis or Perfect Compus, Indicativ.

Alongside the forms presented so far, Romanian makes use of the Present Indicative to refer to some processes situated after t₀. This is an inflectional tense and can convey meanings belonging to the three conventional temporal segments past-present-future:

E.g. Maine plec la Sinaia. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[Tomorrow I’m leaving for Sinaia.] (Present Continuous, Indicative)

E.g. De acum incolo lucrez numai seara. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[From now on I’ll work in the evenings only.] (Simple Future, Indic-

ative)

E.g. Raman in Bucuresti pana vineri. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[I’m staying in Bucharest until Friday.] (Present Continuous, Indic-

ative)

This type of present is called ‘extended present’ and is always accompanied by relational deictic expressions such as: de acum inainte, pana la anul, deseara, la noapte, maine, etc. (from now on, until next year, tonight, tomorrow).

There is another use of the Romanian tense, the prospective present, which refer as well to a period of time situated after the moment of speaking:

E.g. Mai avem de asteptat. Trenul pleaca la 7.30. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[We have some more minutes to wait. The train leaves at 7.30.]

(Simple Present, Indicative)

E.g. Maine este ziua mamei. (Prezent, indcativ)

[Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday.] (Simple Present, Indicative)

E.g. La vara implineste 17 ani. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[Next summer she will turn 17.] (Simple Future, Indicative)

E.g. Avionul decoleaza in doua ore. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[The plane takes off in two hours’ time.] (Simple Present, Indicative)

E.g. Vin peste doua ore. (Prezent, Indicativ)

[I’m coming back in two hours.] (Present Continuous, Indicative]

The usage of the Romanian tenses pays no attention to other modal/pragmatic criteria of selection than the connotation [ Real]. Conversely, English takes into account the type of the utterance most adequate for each communicative purpose and circumstance, thus the grammatical overlapping between the two languages is a far-reaching exploit; therefore, the systematization of speech acts, (with future time reference, for our purpose), would instil a sense of order among the linguistic varieties in both languages, and especially in Romanian, as well as the correspon-dence between the two languages and, implicitly, the use of English as L₂ would be a much easier endeavour.

III.3 The English paradigm

Traditionally, what is generically called the “future tenses” of the English language appears under the following form:

The inventory shown above does not cover the great variety of communicative needs that the speaker/observer has when it comes to referring to processes situated ahead of them. Rather, a great deal of other forms/structures and lexical units serve the speaker’s purposes, tense/time being a strictly deictic category which imposes constraints in selecting one form over another when a ‘shift’ of the reference point occurs. By way of illustration, consider the following examples:

E.g. (a) My train leaves at six p.m. (Simple Present, Indicative)

(b) We are getting married in spring. (Present Continuous, Indicative)

(c) When I see the kids, I’ll send them home. (Simple Present and

Simple Future, respectively, Indicative)

(d) Didn’t I tell you I’d be visiting my relatives (the) next week?

(Future-in-the-Past, Indicative)

(e) Phone me after you have left the office. (Imperative and Present

Perfect, Indicative, respectively)

These examples illustrate the concept of ‘deictic shift’[22], a label given to all the time references occurring in a deictic time sphere other than their original time specification, i.e. they refer to future events, rather than to present ones, although a present tense is used, except for the main clause in example (c), where Simple Future functions as the time anchor for the subordinate. These and others will be dealt with below.

III.4 Alternative Devices for Expressing Futurity

As English has a keener grasp of the concept of time, encoding it not just through the tense inflections that verbs bear, but also through a wide range of time adverbs and adverbial phrases,[23] understandably, there are many difficulties when dealing with English, as a Romanian user of it. What is even more important, is that this formal variety depends either on the content of the utterance (in pragmatic terms, speech acts, like promises, threats, warnings etc.) or on the necessity of accuracy in rendering duration, anteriority, nearness, certainty, projection, etc. Furthermore, there is a general view that time and tense do not represent a one-to-one relationship. Consider the table below that groups all the alternative expressions with a future meaning:

III.5 Overall description of the future forms, in point of meanings and uses

We cannot refer to future events as facts, the same way we refer to past and present, since future events are not open to observation or memory. We can predict with more or less confidence what will happen, we can plan for events to take place, express our intentions and promises with regard to future events. As mentioned many times above, these are modalised, rather than factual statements. This brings forth the matter of future forms belonging to the Indicative mood or not, since this mood is inscribed in the category of realis, a status which has reality in any of its time reference which opposes to the conceptual irrealis content of these forms.[25] This, the morphological and the lexical features shall/will, should/would have, reinforce the viewpoint that English has but two tenses: present and past.

In what follows, I shall adopt another way of organising all grammatical devices that can be employed to refer to the future, so that the process of teaching and learning will be directed towards communicative competence rather than grammar rules description.

i) ‘Safe’ Predictions:

E.g. (1) John will be nineteen tomorrow.

(2) You’ll find petrol more expensive in Romania.

(3) Tomorrow morning I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite.

(4) Tell him Prof. Cressage is involved – he will know Prof.

Cressage.

These are predictions that do not involve the speaker’s volition, and include cyclical events and general truths. Will + infinitive is used, shall by some speakers for ‘I’ and ‘we’[27]. In Romanian they can be translated by Prezent, Viitor Popular and Viitor Propriu-zis, Indicativ:

E.g. (1) John va implini/implineste nouasprezece ani maine.

(2) O sa gasesti/Vei gasi petrolul mai scump in Romania.

(3) Maine dimineata ma voi trezi/trezesc in hotelul acesta de prima

clasa.

(4) Spune-i ca ste implicat profesorul Cressage – va sti cine este

profesorul Cressage.

Will/shall + progressive aspect combine the meaning of futurity with that focusing on the internal process, in this way avoiding the implication of promise associated with will when the subject is ‘I’ or ‘we’. Compare:

E.g. I will (I’ll) speak to him about your project next Friday.

We shall (we’ll) be assessing your project shortly.

[Ii voi vorbi despre proiectul tau vinerea viitoare.]

[Va vom evalua proiectul in cel mai scurt timp.]

This linguistic device is traditionally acknowledge as Future Continuous, but for the coherence and cohesion of the present paper it will be included in a separated category:

ii) Future On-going Events:

This category comprises activities in progress over a period of time in the future:

E.g. (1) With my new job, I will be travelling back and forth across the

country.

(2) Alan will be studying until 5:00 tonight, and then he has to meet

his professor

(3) No doubt at this time tomorrow Nick will be arguing with his

girlfriend.

(4) The headline writers will be wondering endlessly about Mrs

Thacher’s choice of an election date

In sentence (1), the action is recurrent over a period of time in the future; hence the use of the progressive form of will-future is required. In example (2), the activity is in progress up to a point in the future and in the third and fourth examples the activities are on-going at some point in the future.

In Romanian, these utterances appear either in Viitor Propriu-zis or Viitor Popular, Indicativ:

E.g. (1) In noua mea slujba voi calatori/o sa calatoresc de la un capat al

tarii in altul.

(2) Alan va invata/o sa invete pana deseara la 5, apoi trebuie sa-si

intalneasca profesorul.

(3) Fara indoiala, maine pe vremea asta Nick va avea/o sa aiba o

discutie cu prietena sa.

(4) Editorialistii se vor intreba la nesfarsit /o sa se tot intrebe care

este data pe care d-na Thacher a ales-o pentru alegeri

iii) Programmed/scheduled events:

Future events seen as certain because they are unalterable (1) or scheduled (2), (3) and (4) can be expressed by the Present Tense + time adjunct, by will or by the lexical auxiliaries be due to + infinitive and be to (simple forms only). According to L. G. Alexander, the will-form is used particularly in formal written language[28]:

E.g. (1) The sun sets at 20.25 hours tomorrow.

(2) Next year’s conference will be held in New York.

He is due to start university in two months’ time.

He is to marry the future heiress of the throne.

The Romanian counterparts are either Viitor Propriu-zis/Popular, or Present, Indicativ in all cases:

E.g. (1) Soarele apune/va apune la orele 20.25 maine.

(2) Conferinta de anul viitor se va tine/o sa se tina/se tine la New

York.

(3) [El] Va incepe/O sa inceapa/Incepe facultatea peste doua luni.

(4) Se va casatori/ O sa se casatoreasca/Se casatoreste cu mosteni-

toarea tronului.

This use of Simple Present can occur in narrative sequence, or in a context where the future reference is assumed. Such an example is given by Leech[29]:

E.g. Right! We meet at Victoria at nine o’clock, catch the first train to

Dover, have lunch at the Castle Restaurant, then walk to Deal.

The statement suggests an irrevocable decision about the course of the events, due to the Simple Present, as if the enacting in advance of the events takes place. In Romanian such structures are rendered by Prezent or Viitor, Indicativ, since the Romanian tenses do not encode such meanings, rather they are signalled through lexical specifications:

E.g. Bine! Ne intalnim/Ne vom intalni la gara Victoria la ora noua, ne

urcam/vom urca in primul tren catre Dover, luam/vom lua pranzul

la Restaurantul Castel, apoi mergem/vom merge in orasul Deal.

iv) Intentions:

Such situations can be expressed by the semi-auxiliary be + going to + infinitive (1), be + about to (when intent is the purpose of the communication) and the Present Continuous (2).

E.g. (1) I am going to try to get a loan.

(2) I’m about to go home.

We’re thinking of selling our old car.  

The ‘going to’ construction is a special case of 1) grammaticalisation and 2) semantic change from an allative (“a type of inflection which expresses the meaning of motion ‘to’ or ‘towards’ a place) meaning to a more abstract and hence more grammaticalised future meaning. Heine et al., 1991, page 70 gives account of this process of grammaticalisation which is a metaphoric extension from what they call ‘a more concrete source domain’ (example 1) to ‘a more abstract target domain’ (example 4):

E.g. (1) Liliy is going to town.

(2) George: Are you going to the library?

Lily: No, I’m going to eat.

(3) George is going to do his very best to make Lily happy.

(4) It is going to rain.

The first example has the allative (spatial) meaning, while the fourth expresses a purely future meaning, between them the two utterances being intermediate – (2) reflects an intention meaning and (3) intention plus a secondary sense, prediction.

Even though this kind of grammatical-semantic shift can offer a hint about the time content of ‘going to’ constructions, there still exist contexts in which the grammaticalisation of this expression does not apply entirely or clearly and which may raise difficulties in rendering English texts into Romanian or the other way round. Consider these examples:

E.g. (5) George is going to buy some champagne.

(6) I am going to study in the library.

On this matter, I am going to favour Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green’s view,[30] according to which the plausible meaning here is intention (future time reference) rather than spatial motion, as ‘the conceptualiser mentally scans the agents’ motion through TIME rather than SPACE, and this scanning becomes salient in the conceptualiser’s construal because the motion along this path is not objectively salient (there is no physical motion).’ Again, the accuracy of decoding such utterances is given by the extended context, or is subject of pragmatic inference.

In Romanian, the whole situation lies between present and future time reference, the ambiguity rising only starting from the third example on. The disambiguation is ensured by the context, as well.

E.g. (1) Lily se duce in oras.

(2) George: Te duci la biblioteca?

Lily: Nu, ma duc sa mananc.

(3) George are de gand/intentioneaza/are sa faca tot ce-i sta in

puteri ca sa o faca fericita pe Lily.

(4) Va ploua/O sa ploua.

(5) George intentioneaza/se duce sa cumpere sampanie.

(6) Intentionez/O sa studiez/Ma duc sa studiez in biblioteca.

There is still a type of syntactic synonymy between the ‘going to’-future and the will-future, when ‘the intention is neither clearly premeditated nor clearly unpremeditated’[32]:

E.g. (1) I will/am going to climb that mountain one day.

(2) I won’t/am not going to tell you my age.

The same linguists draw a parallel between the two structures highlighting the contexts which are compatible with one of them or the other, but not with both:

the be going to form always implies a premeditated intention plus a sense of previous arrangement, while will + infinitive implies intention alone. This is shown by the following examples:

E.g. (3) I have bought some bricks and I’m going to build a garage.

(4) There is somebody at the hall door. I’ll go and open it

(5) What are you doing with that spade? I am going to plant

some apple trees.

Will + infinitive in the affirmative is used almost entirely for the first person. Second and third person intentions are therefore normally expressed by be going to, as well as in the first person:

E.g. (6) He is going to resign.

(7) Are you going to leave without paying?

In the negative, won’t can be used for all persons:

E.g. (8) He isn’t going to resign.

Or

(9) He won’t resign.

As stated above, be going to implies immediacy, while will + infinitive can refer either to the immediate or to the more remote future:

E.g. (10) Some workers arrived today with a roller. I think they are going

to repair our road.

(11) This is a terrible heavy box. ~ I’ll help you carry it.

The examples built with the will-future cannot be rephrased using the going to structure, since in the first case, the evidence of premeditation is clear, whereas in the second, there is a sense of spontaneity in showing the intention.

Romanian has a few periphrastic structures that can render both English forms, such as: ’a intentiona sa’, a avea de gand sa’, along with Viitor Propriu-zis, or Viitor Popular, Indicativ.

E.g. (1) Intr-o buna zi voi escalada/am de gand sa escaladez muntele

acela.

(2) Nu iti voi spune/N-am de gand sa iti spun varsta mea.

(3) Am cumparat niste caramizi si intentionez sa-mi construiesc un

garaj.

(4) Este cineva la usa din hol.~

Ma duc/voi duce sa deschid.

(5) Ce faci cu sapa aceea?~

Intentionez/Am de gand sa plantez niste meri.

(6) Intentionaza/Are de gand sa demisioneze.

(7) Ai de gand/Intentionezi sa pleci fara sa platesti?

(8) N-are de gand/Nu intentioneaza sa demisioneze.

(9) Nu va demisiona.

(10) Azi au sosit niste muncitori cu un rulou. Cred ca o sa repare/

au de gand sa repare drumul.

(11) E ingrozitor de grea cutia asta.~

Te voi ajuta/Te ajut eu s-o cari.

Some communicative situations require the conveyance of an event posterior to a past moment, named by some linguists ‘prospective past’, this providing a past form constraint to the ‘going to’ form:

E.g. (12) He was going to send the invitations but the guest list was no-

where to be found.

(13) I was going to ask for my money back, but I was advised not to.

(14) Lucy was going to travel round the world when she left school.

(12) Avea de gand/Intentiona/Avea sa trimita invitatiile, dar lista de

invitati era de negasit.

(13) Eu intentionam sa-mi cer/Aveam de gand sa-mi cer banii

inapoi, dar am fost sfatuit sa n-o fac.

(14) Lucy intentiona/avea de gand sa calatoresca in jurul lumii cand

termina scoala.

The Romanian counterparts are built with Imperfect, Indicativ, which bears an aspectual sense – progressive – existent in English too. (As argument for this, see Infra: page 36)

v) Imminent/forthcoming/impending events:

When nearness is needed to be expressed, English usually uses periphrastic structures, be + going to, be + about to + infinitive, be on the point of/be on the verge of + -ing form. When the will-form is used for such purposes, an adverb or adjective (imminent, immediate, immediately, shortly, etc.) has to be present to add the idea of imminence to the futurity reference. Furthermore, in most of the cases, the imminence of the happening is externally or internally signalled:

E.g. (1) It looks as if it’s going to rain.

(2) This company is about to branch/on the verge of branching out.

(3) A decision from the judges is imminent. We will return to the

law court as soon as we have any further news.

The first example displays two meanings, the nearness of a process and the prediction based on present evidence. The other two examples express only the immediacy of the events.

As for Romanian, these can be rendered in various ways, either by periphrastic constructions or by various forms of future (Viitor Propriu-zis, Viitor Popular):

E.g. (1) Arata de parca ar sta sa ploua./Se pare ca va ploua.

(2) Compania aceasta este pe cale/pe punctul de a se extinde.

(3) Decizia judecatorilor este iminenta. Ne vom intoarce/O sa ne in-

toarcem la tribunal de indata ce avem/vom avea vesti.

vi) Arrangements/Plans made beforehand:

First, in most of the cases, English uses Present Progressive to express a definite arrangement in the near future:

E.g. (1) I’m taking an exam in October.

(2) Bob and Ann are meeting tonight.

(3) I’m staying home tonight.

(4) What are you doing next Saturday?

(5) I’m seeing him tomorrow.

This type of future cannot be used with those categories of verbs that do not accept the progressive aspect: verbs of perception, those denoting mental activities, feelings, etc.

Second, the going to – form can also convey this meaning, though there is ambiguity in an utterance like this, since the borderline between intention and plan/arrangement is difficult to draw, both senses implying premeditation. Take these examples for comparison:

E.g. (6) He is going to visit his old friends this weekend.

(7) Our new piano is going to be delivered tomorrow.

The first example can be read either ‘he has the intention of’ or ‘he has planned this’, and the second ‘according to a previous plan’ or ‘there is the intention of’

To be to + infinitive is another way of conveying a plan, though this is specific to newspapers mostly or in formal arrangements:

E.g. (8) She is to be married next month.

(9) The expedition is to start in a week’s time.

When referring to planned events, particularly in connection with travel, Future Continuous can be used:

E.g. (10) We’ll be spending the winter in Australia. (= we are spending)

(11) Professor Craig will be giving a lecture on Etruscan pottery

tomorrow evening. (= is giving)

Romanian has no structural constraints in rendering such meanings, that is, a certain form – whether it is Prezent or Viitor, Indicativ – does not necessarily convey a certain meaning; rather, various forms can be employed in serving the same semantic needs. Compare:

E.g. (1) In octombrie sustin /voi sustine un examen.

(2) Bob si Ann se intalnesc/vor intalni deseara.

(3) Deseara stau/voi sta acasa.

(4) Ce o sa faci/vei face anul viitor in septembrie?

(5) Ma intalnesc/voi intalni cu el maine.

(6) Isi va vizita/Intentionaza/Are de gand sa isi viziteze vechii

prieteni la sfarsitul acesta de saptamana.

(7) Pianul ne va fi/o sa ne fie livrat maine.

(8) Se casatoreste/va casatori luna viitoare.

(9) Expeditia va incepe/urmeaza sa inceapa intr-o saptamana.

(10) Ne vom petrece/O sa ne petrecem iarna in Australia.

(11) Profesorul Craig va sustine/o sa sustina o conferinta pe tema

olaritului etrusc maine seara.

As easily seen in the examples above, English verbal forms not only anchors the action/state on a certain point on the time axis, but this temporal function co-occur with others, in these cases – the idea of plan/arrangement. Conversely, Romanian does not appeal to verbal forms only, when having to associate a supplementary meaning, because the Romanian tenses are not endowed with such functions. It is the context that associates functions/meanings with temporal references.

vii) Predictions:

Simple Future can be employed to make predictions about future, irrespective of the presence of the explicit performatives - verbs that label the speech act (‘think’, ‘assume’, ‘believe’, etc) - or implicit performatives, in which case the speaker consciously makes use of pragmatic inference, so that they can choose the appropriate grammatical structure to render the intended meaning:

E.g. (1) As she grows up, she’ll see that her dislike of Gavin is irrational

even if she can’t admit it.

(2) The procedure is very simple and will be familiar by now.

(4) I think she’ll answer ‘yes’ to every question you ask her.

(5) I shall regret this for the rest of my life!

(6) As we shall discover, the concept of child abuse is an extremely

elusive one and means different things to different people.

(7) My father will probably be in hospital for at least two weeks.

The use of shall for the prediction meaning (examples 5, 6, 7) is rarely used outside the English of Southern England. The canonical use, compulsion, is mainly con-fined to legal and administrative language.

A lot more difficult is with the Romanian language, since there are no grammatical constraints upon what structure to use when rendering this meaning, hence the confusion about which form to use to translate/render such texts into English, since predictions can be rendered by Prezent, Viitor Propriu-zis, Viitor Popular, Indicativ, but without naming what Romanian ‘does with words’. Compare:

E.g. (1) Cand va creste/o sa creasca, va vedea/o sa vada ca toata antipatia

sa pentru Gavin este irationala, chiar daca nu poate s-o recu-

noasca.

(2) Procedura este foarte simpla si, probabil, este/va fi fost clara pana

acum.

(3) Sezonul turistic se (va) deschide pana maine.

(4) Cred ca va raspunde/o sa raspunda ‘da’ la orice intrebare a ta.

(5) Voi regreta/O/Am sa regret asta tot restul vietii mele.

(6) Asa cum vom descoperi/o sa descoperim, conceptul de molestare

a copilului este unul extreme de ambiguu si inseamna multe lu-

cruri, pentru multi oameni.

As this paper is intended for upper-intermediate & advanced students, the description of the five categories of speech acts produced by Searle[33] can be introduced, which would solve the discrepancies between the two languages in point of communicative functions and the grammatical constraints they impose, when it comes to promises, threats, requests, commands, claims, et..

E.g. Mi se pare ca se inchide/va inchide/o sa se inchida si aceasta fabrica

in scurt timp.

Romanian can employ either Prezent or any type of Viitor Propriu-zis, Indicativ, while in English only the will-form or, if present evidence is assumed to exist for such a prediction, ‘going to’-form can be used:

E.g. It seems to me/I believe that this factory will be/is going to be closed

down soon.

Predictions based on present evidence are, therefore, conveyed by the ‘going to’- form:

E.g. (1) It’s going to rain. Look at those heavy clouds.

(2) Help! I’m going o fall!

The years of teaching experience tell me that if students are exposed to the speech act theory, adapted to their learning stage and age, they will handle futurity more easily, which is the objective of any teaching endeavour.

viii) Future anterior events:

The relation between time and tense has great consequences in the attempts of systematizing grammar; what is more, the interaction between the past and future times gives rise to complex notions to this relation. We may look to a posterior situation from a past reference point (see examples (3), (4) and (5) in iv) and, conversely, from a future reference point to an anterior event. The latter temporal perspective is rendered by future perfect. Günter Radden and René Dirven represent such situations graphically, naming the former past prospective and the latter in the traditional way, future perfect:[34]

Figure The representation of the future actions/states sequencing

They claim that the two situations ‘display near-perfect mirror images’, each involving separate segments of time: speech time (S), reference time (R) and event time (E) and in each (R) being placed further away from (S) than (E). The conceptual difference between the known reality of the past and the projected reality of the future entails different notions of time, an idea sustained by many linguistic studies, especially in cognitive grammar or cognitive linguistics.[35]

By way of further illustration, consider the following examples:

E.g. (1) By the time he is twenty-one, he’ll have become the deputy

manager of the hotel.

(2) The concert will have started before you arrive.

(3) Readers may prefer to wait for the paperback to appear,

by which time most mistakes will have been ironed out.

(4) Chances are you will have stirred things up enough to bring a

question to the surface.

The Romanian language renders these structures rather oddly, for people with an accurate time axis in mind. Not only does it lack the idea of sequence of tenses, which is crucial in English in contexts like the above ones, (in all examples, the present form of the verb in the subordinate clause is required by its temporal nature, while in the main clause the future perfect is used), but it also uses Viitorul Propriu-zis, Indicativ (the Formal Future, Indicative) in both sentences, leaving the connectors to signal the temporal relation between the events. In the last example, however, Romanian uses either the Perfect Infinitive or the Perfect Conjunctive/Subjunctive where English has Future Perfect:

E.g. (1) Pana cand va implini 21 de ani, va deveni managerul adjunct al

hotelului.

(2) Concertul va incepe pana vei sosi tu.

(3) Cititorii ar putea sa astepte sa apara volumul, timp in care cele

mai multe greseli vor fi disparut/disparea.

(4) Exista sansa de a fi pregatit/sa fi pregatit terenul pentru a aduce

in discutie o problema.

As with any English verbal form, future perfect has simple aspect, which designates the repetition of an event in the future before a time limit, and a progressive variant which emphasises duration of the event up to that limit of time and the incompletion of the sequence:

E.g. (1) We’ll have lived here for ten years by next July.

(2) We’ll have been living here for ten years by next July.

Romanian signals duration through lexical units, as the verb has no such category, that is why, both English sentences are translated in only one variant, by means of Present Indicative:

E.g. Se vor implini zece ani in iulie de cand locuim aici.

Or

In iulie sunt zece ani de cand locuim aici.

ix) Past prospective:

When the expected event is oriented from a past reference point, it is expressed by the past corresponding forms of the above phrases. This type of futurity is called Past Prospective[36]:

(2) The most celebrated suburban development involved

Such instances refer to ‘some time in the past [primary time reference] when a future event [become, know, prove – which have secondary future reference] was anticipated, which is to say that the event time for becoming, knowing, proving is out of sequence and is, moreover, future relative to the past narrative time. Such sentences, then, refer to a past situation in the future relative to that primary past: actions or intentions in that past are leading to that future.’ (Noonan, op. cit. page 120)

The same phenomenon can occur with ‘will’-future, would being used as the past form:

E.g. (4) Little did Harriet know that in ten years Waldo would be the

richest man in Frostbite Falls.

Romanian possesses only one structure that can be thought of as the equivalent for English: (a) the Imperfect form of the auxiliary a avea and the Present Conjunctive/Subjunctive of the notional verb. Apart from this, Romanian can also employ (b) Viitor, Indicativ to render such a meaning, lacking the sequence of tense constraints.

E.g. (1.a) Nu este ceea ce credea ca avea sa devina.

Vs.

(1.b) Nu este ceea ce credea ca va deveni/o sa devina.

(2.a) Cea mai cunoscuta dezvoltare suburbana a inlcus ceea ce avea

sa se fie cunoscut dupa 1915 ca ‘Metroland’

Vs.

(2.b) Cea mai cunoscuta dezvoltare suburbana a inclus ceea ce va fi

cunoscut dupa 1915 drept ‘Metroland’

(3.a) Redescoperirea vietii urbane avea sa se dovedeasca un proces

lent

Vs.

(3.b) Redescoperirea vietii urbane se va dovedi un process lent.

(4.a) Nu prea stia Harriet ca in zece ani Waldo avea sa fie cel mai

bogat om din Frostbite Falls.

Vs.

(4.b) Nu stia Harriet ca Waldo va fi cel mai bogat om din Frostbite

Falls.

In such cases, the Romanian learners need to be introduced/to reinforce the concepts of time reference, point of reference, posteriority, simultaneity and anteriority so that they can understand that there is little, if any, resemblance between the English and Romanian syntax. Almost invariably the Romanian learners tend to translate the Romanian (b) contexts by will-future, which is felt to be the English equivalent for Viitor, Indicativ.

x) Requests, offers and promises

Both label two kinds of speech acts, coded by the will-future. Consider the following examples:

E.g. (1) Will you pass me the salt?

(2) Will you lend me your dictionary?

(3) Shall I give you a hand in tomorrow’s contest?

(4) Shall we bring you anything from the journey?

The four utterances are questions in form, but their content points to something else; we have to do with a request/demand (requesting means getting the addressee to commit to making the proposition true, not waiting for information – these speech acts are called directives[37]), in (1) and (2), in that they expect a non-linguistic answer, but an act – the addressee is expected to pass the salt or lend the dictionary, rather than answering ‘Yes, I will’ and performing nothing else. In this case, the cooperative principle would be left aside, the communicative act being null.

In examples (3) and (4) we have to do with a different kind of speech act. Though the answers to these can be linguistic, at a more subtle level, they convey a kind of commitment between the two interlocutors. In this case, they lie among those speech acts labelled as ‘commissives’, together with promises. The difficulty in dealing with these linguistically is that they are indirect speech acts, the accuracy in decoding their meanings depending on the extended context which may overtly point to such meanings and/or on inference, based on cultural convention.

Most traditional grammars describe these types of utterances as containing a modal verb, rather than conveying futurity. Speech act theory rules away the shortcoming resulting from the traditional assumptions and my stating that these speech acts point to an after-the-moment-of-speaking realisation of the content. I will take as arguments the description of these constructions made by Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza and Annalisa Baicchi in Illocutionary constructions: Cognitive motivation and linguistic realization, published in the linguistic series Explorations in Pragmatics, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007. Thus, an utterance like: Will you buy the tickets (tomorrow)? may be read as a question about the future, in the same way as examples (1) and (2) I gave above, with or without an adverbial of time being present. This is because about (1) and (2) we can infer that the request they contain may be fulfilled after the hearer has finished using the salt or the dictionary, respectively, which anchors both situations on the time axis ahead of the moment of speaking.

Things are different with the Romanian language. The most frequent structure used for such purposes contains a modal verb – a vrea:

E.g. (1) N-ai vrea/Vrei sa imi dai sarea?

(2) N-ai vrea/Vrei sa imi imprumuti dictionarul tau?

(3) N-ai vrea/Vrei/Sa-ti dau o mana de ajutor la concursul

de maine?

(4) Vreti/Sa va aducem ceva din calatorie?

These are some more cases which, introduced to the students under the ‘label’ cited in the subheading, reinforce the effectiveness of the functional grammar approach that this paper has attempted to prove so far. This also counts for the organisation of the linguistic material as formal/informal/colloquial, since there are various degrees of politeness when conveying directives, from plain imperatives to formulas including modal-auxiliary verbs, which make the utterance politer through their quality of ‘mitigating devices’ (Mendoza & Baicchi, op. cit. page 107).

A different type of speech acts are promises, described in the linguistic treatises as illocutionary acts that are internal to the locutionary act, in the sense that, if the contextual conditions are appropriate (commitment to carry out what is promised), by simply saying the words, someone performs the act of promising, as well:

E.g. (1) I promise I’ll be there to support you.

(2) I’ll post the letter for you.

The first is a direct speech act – it contains a performative verb, promise, the second is an indirect speech act, as its type is inferred, rather than labelled.[38] With communicative situations as in the second example (indirect speech acts), the translation into Romanian is uncomplicated, but when English is the target language for such speech acts, things become a little more difficult, because the confusion between intention and promise is common in Romanian. Compare:

E.g. Iti voi scrie/O sa iti scriu in fiecare zi.

This sentence can be decoded as intention or promise, by way of inference, depending to a great extent on the extended context. The consequence is the differentiated grammatical treatment of the utterance in English: the former ‘reading’ requires going to-future, the latter – the will-future:

E.g. I’m going to write to you every day. (intention)

I shall/will write to you every day. (promise)

xi) Hopes, decisions:

This category does not display difficulties for the Romanian students of any level, since it carries no ambiguities. In most cases, the verb hope is the explicit signal of the content of the utterance, whereas the meaning ‘decision’ is generated by a rather unequivocal context.

E.g. (1) Sper ca ii va placea/o sa ii placa Londra.

(2) Spera ca se va obisnui/o sa se obisnuiasca/are sa se obisnuiasca

repede cu trezitul devreme.

(3) Nu imi place culoarea. Nu cumpar/voi cumpara/o sa cumpar

tapetul acesta.

(4) Traducerea aceasta este foarte buna. O sa cumpar/Voi cumpara

volumul acesta de versuri.

The functional approach of the matter I am proposing will simplify the transfer from Romanian into English, particularly due to the wide range of grammatical devices which can convey not only these meanings these (Viitor Literar, Viitor Popular, Prezent-Indicativ) and to the lack of structural overlapping between the two languages that I am bringing face to face in this paper; conversely, the formalist approach, which takes into account the grammatical structure, would make things more difficult for the same reasons I stated above, plus the use of only one tense form in English for such meanings, namely the will/shall-future:

E.g. (1) I hope he’ll like London.

(2) He hopes he’ll get used to waking up early.

(3) I don’t like the colour. I won’t/shan’t buy this wallpaper.

(4) This translation is great. I’ll buy this poetry volume.

III.6 Futurity in complex sentences:

i)      Clauses of time:

The Romanian students learn English verb tenses one by one, so when they learn how to use adverbial clauses of time in the future, they are puzzled. Things are different in complex sentences in comparison with the independent ones, syntactically speaking, though from the semantic point of view there are no major variations. The explanation of this state of affairs was given by many linguists, among whom I mention Tregidgo, P. S.[39], Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman , and to whose view I subscribe.

Thus, in The Grammar Book, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freemen take a historical approach of this linguistic issue. They begin the discussion with an example which I am going to cite here, as an appropriate starting point:

‘John will travel to Europe this summer. After he returns to the States, he will begin graduate work in Management.’

They explain the reason why the present tense is used on the future time axis as follows: first, Old English had two tenses, present and past, and present tense was used in order to express future time. Second, older forms and orders are retained longer in subordinate clauses than in independent clauses (ibid.). If the present tense was used in order to express future time, it is possible that it can be used in adverbial clauses of future time.

In the same way, Tregidgo (1974: 192) corroborates this point by using ‘the notion of tense-subordination,’ explaining that ‘it means that the view point of the tense-form (the subordinate tense) is based on the viewpoint of another (governing tense)’. In other words, the main clause tense affects the subordinate one. For example, ‘When you put your coat on, you will feel warmer.’ He rewrites this complex sentence into compound sentences, such as ‘You will put your coat on and you will feel warmer.’ The first sentence ‘you will put your coat on’ is closely related to the second one ‘you will feel warmer.’ He concludes, ‘If we subordinate the first clause to the second, we also subordinate the first tense to second.’ (Tregidgo, 1974: 195) His explanation is clear and this is how this structure works in some sentences from newspapers and movies. In the Daily Local News, on June 9, 2002, there is an article that reads:

E.g. When the school bell rings for afternoon dismissal today at Bishop

Shanahan High School, students will exit the historic Catholic high

school for the final time.

Beginning this fall, an estimated 950 Shanahan students will attend

a newly constructed 1,200 student capacity high school in Downing-

town.

The present tense of rings here does not indicate present time, but the same time, or very close to the time of students’ leaving the high school. The use of will ring is not possible here, because the clause describing the action of the bells has been subordinated to the clause describing the action of the students by the use of the word when.

When bringing Romanian and English face to face, things get complicated because the two languages encode such examples differently. Compare:

E.g. (1) He’ll phone his friends as soon as he arrives at destination.

(2) When we meet, I’ll explain everything.

(Will-future, in the main/matrix clause and Present Simple, in the

subordinate clause)

Vs.

Isi va suna/O sa isi sune prietenii de indata ce va ajunge/o sa ajunga la destinatie

Cand ne vom intalni/o sa ne intalnim, iti voi explica/o sa-ti explic totul. (Viitor, Indicative in both sentences)

This ‘rule’ applies in each case of time clauses, when the event time of both matrix/main and secondary clause are concomitant, irrespective of the conjunction (when, before, whenever, as soon as, the moment, until, the day) that connects the two clauses. By way of illustration, consider these examples:

E.g. (1) He’ll finish his project before the manager asks for it.

(2) The moment we get there, we’ll check in.

(3) I’ll be extremely happy the day you get a job.

All these complex sentences display the conformity with a fixed constructional rule: will-future – matrix clause

Present Simple – secondary clause.

A completely different instantiation is required in the case of a complex sentence where the two component clauses are joined by the conjunction after. The syntactic relation is that of anteriority (on the part of the secondary clause) to the event time in the main clause, which imposes a sequence of tense constraint upon the whole sentence:

E.g. (4) After Jim has finished his speech, people will leave the meeting.

[Dupa ce Jim isi va fi terminat/va termina discursul, va parasi se-

Dinta.]

Since the secondary clause refers to an activity prior to the one in the matrix clause, two constraints are impose: one has to satisfy the concept of anteriority, therefore the perfective aspect is needed, the second has to take into account the status of the clause which indicates anteriority, namely, a secondary clause, which rules out the use of a future form, according to the English normative grammar. The consequence is that Present Perfect satisfies both conditions, as shown in (4).

Romanian behaves differently, as seen in the translation, in that it uses Viitor Perfect (in a rather bookish variant of the language) or Viitor Propiu-zis, Indicativ, in both clauses.

In cases where anteriority to the event time in the secondary clause needs rendering, the perfective will-form is used in the matrix clause, either simple or in the progressive aspect. Consider these:

E.g. (1) They’ll have discovered the truth by the time the trial finishes.

[Vor fi descoperit/Vor descoperi adevarul pana cand se va

termina procesul.]

(2) The city will have undergone major changes by the time the

Olympic Games begin.

[Orasul va fi suferit/va suferi schimbari majore pana vor incepe

Jocurile Olimpice.]

I’ll have been working on this paper for a few months by the time

I have to hand it in.

[Voi fi lucrat/Voi lucra la aceasta teza vreo cateva luni pana va fi timpul s-o predau.]

[Va fi plouat/Va ploua minute in sir pana vom putea sa iesim in oras.]

(1) And (2) have the perfect will-form in relation with Present Simple, whereas (3) and (4) follow the pattern perfect will-form, in the progressive aspect + Present Simple. Both will-futures appear in the matrix clauses, while Present Simple is required by the subordinate one. Though aspect partakes of the notion ‘time’, just like tense, it brings no temporal nuances to the utterance, but ‘some internal phases/stages in the development of the situation’.[41] The progressive aspect shows the ‘unfolding in time’ of the actions will have been working/raining, while the perfective aspect ‘provides a holistic, summarizing or unifying view upon the situation described’ (I. Baciu, op. cit., page 2) in all four sentences.

Romanian has Viitor, Indicativ in both clauses, proving no sequence of tense constraints at all.

ii)    Conditionals:

In The Grammar Book, M. Celce-Murcia and D. Larsen-Freemen cite Covitt (Ch.25), who in a survey of the most serious teaching problems encountered by ESL teachers found that conditional sentences rank fifth. I myself found difficulties in teaching these, due to the various syntactic relation(s) established between the two clauses that form the complex sentence. Furthermore, the semantics of the conditionals is subtle and difficult to understand, especially for ESL/EFL students, that is why I have chosen to deal with complex sentences at this point of my paper.[42]

Traditionally, this issue is presented oversimplified, in that the inventory of these sentences is limited to three types, having the following description:

Future Conditional: If I have the money, I will take a vacation.

Present Conditional: If I had the money, I would take a vacation.

Past Conditional: If I had had the money, I would have taken a vacation.

Moreover, a number of grammars refer to the first sentence as a ‘real’ or ‘possible’ conditional as opposed to the second and third, which refer to the ‘unreal/hypothetical’ present/future and past, respectively.

Another problem encountered with my students is that they associate past tense forms with past time, which leads to puzzlement when, for instance, in various exams, (as well as in direct communication interaction), a hypothetical situation with future time reference was asked to be rephrased by a second conditional sentence, (which is realized with Past Simple in the secondary clause). In other words, pupils find it difficult to associate a past time form with a (semantically) post-present domain. [See infra iii)]

In this section I shall refer to those types of conditionals that can be anchored in the post-present domain, namely having future time reference and their equivalents in Romanian.

E.g. (1) If all goes well, we’ll reach Dover by four.

(2) If Mary goes, I’ll go.

(3) Say one more word and I’ll kill you.

(4) If I submit my thesis this month, I’ll feel relieved.

(5) You can/may come with us if you want to.

(5) I’ll give you $5 if you mow the lawn.

(6) If I were you, I wouldn’t repeat this mistake.

(7) He wouldn’t call you so frequently if you didn’t allow him.

(8) You could help me with the housework if you wanted.

All these sentences share the same logical/semantic features, up to a point:

Ø     (a) Logically, they are included in the if p, (then) q frame;

Ø     (b) All of them can point to a post-present domain, except for (6), (7), and (8), which can refer to a present domain, as well, depending on the presence of an indexical marker – a present time adverbial – or on the extended context that points to such a time domain;

Ø     (c) (3) displays a different formal instantiation that lacks the canonical marker if (Imperative + and + will-future), but as stated above, is included in the same logical frame;

Ø     (d) (5) contains no specific future time markers; it is built with a modal verb and Simple Present, which leads to the method of decoding stated in (b).

Ø     All the above sentences convey a speech act or can have modal readings: warning, threat, prediction, reproach/disapproval.

Ø     (1) to (5) have to do with realis domain, (traditionally, real conditional), whereas (6) to (8) belong to the irrealis domain (hypothetical conditional), that is why the mood/tense domain (Conditional Mood, Present + Past Tense, Indicative) differ to that in (1) to (5), where Indicative is employed [except for (3), where the Imperative Mood appears].

Since this thesis focuses on teaching futurity, I feel bound to mention that the most effective teaching approach of these complex sentences is the eclectic one, as both the structural and functional approaches proved to have flaws, when applied separately. Therefore, the structural analysis clarifies the fact that two (or more) clauses are involved in such a syntactic relation, while the functional/semantic approach can clarify some ambiguous meanings, which can help to decide which grammatical device is most suitable for which purpose.

For instance, if asked to give a suggestion[43], (a directive, in speech act theory), under the form of a conditional sentence, the functional description combines perfectly with the formal description to serve this purpose, either approach taken independently puzzling the ESL student, since the structure does not imply such a speech act, nor the linguistic function says anything about the mood-tense dynamics.

E.g If I were her, I would be more understanding.

[Daca as fi in locul ei, as fi mai ingaduitoare.]

Another reason for a twofold treatment of the matter is the difference between English and Romanian. In the second conditional, English allows the use of (Present) Conditional only in the matrix/main clause while in the secondary clause a Subjunctive is used (identical in form with Past Simple, Indicative, except for the verb to be); Romanian employs Prezent Conditional in both clauses. In the first conditional, English displays the same mood-tense constraints (will-future in the main clause and Present Simple in the secondary clause); conversely, Romanian employs the same tense, namely Viitor, Indicativ, in both clauses:

E.g. If all goes well, we’ll reach Dover by four.

[Daca totul va decurge bine, vom ajunge in Dover pana la 4.]

iii)  Reported Speech:

The last part of this chapter looks at (1) the tense variations generated by the reported speech constraints and (2) the Romanian counterparts. The cases that I am discussing in this section are those which raise problems to the Romanian learners, leaving aside the aspects that are quite similar to the variations in Romanian.

a)     Introduction:

When a speaker wants to report what someone else has said, or to repeat his/her own words, the speaker may choose to either directly quote:

E.g. (1) Andrew said, ‘I’ll post this letter tomorrow.’ (DS)

or to use Indirect Speech (also referred to as ‘Reported Speech’):

E.g. (2) Andrew said that he would post that letter the following day.

Apart from the punctuation differences between the two reports, one can see quite a few structural differences, as well. These changes (the absence of the complementizer that, without altering the grammaticality of the sentence, the pronominal variation, the tense and the adverbial of time/place changes) and how ESL/EFL students could more easily cope with such issues are the object of this chapter.

b)     The complementizerTHAT:

The first obvious syntactic change when moving from a type of report to the other, is the presence of a complementizer – that; the subordination is thus signalled, not to mention the punctuation that in (1) marks two sentences (namely – two independent clauses), while in (2), the syntactic relation is that of unilateral dependence: one clause (‘he would post that letter the following day’) is embedded in the matrix/main clause.

What generates difficulties to the Romanian learner is the possibility of omitting the complementizer from the English complex sentence, without grammatical/semantic consequences. Compare example (2) above to its Romanian counterpart below:

E.g. Andrew a spus/zis ca va expedia scrisoarea maine.

Andrew a spus/zis va expedia scrisoarea maine.

In Romanian it would be ungrammatical to omit the complimentizer, as the subordination is signalled in such cases by the conjunction ‘ca’ itself, when statements are reported.

E.g. Te-am informat ca urmeaza sa ne mutam saptamana viitoare.

[I informed you (that) we were going to move house the next week.]

c)     Shifting/Backshifting

The changes mentioned in the introduction of this section are generally known as ‘shift’ or ‘back shift’, as seen in the (1) and (2). The pronominal shift does not cause difficulties to Romanian students, because there are no variations when moving from one language to the other. The great obstacle appears when tenses and some adverbials of time and place differ from one report to the other, in English, while in Romanian the changes are scarce.

E.g. ‘I’m going to investigate this matter myself starting from today,’

said John. (Direct Speech)

John said (that) he was going to investigate that matter himself,

starting from that day. (Reported Speech)

The first shift that took place is at the pronominal level, the first person changing into the third. Other changes in pronominal forms are from the second into the third person, from the second person into the first. These changes are similar in the two languages under analysis here, that is why I consider them being outside the interest area of this paper.

The second and the most challenging for ESL/EFL students are the variations of tenses, time adverbials, and demonstratives, when the reporting verb is in a past tense. As a result, there might be situations where Past Tense (1) or even Past Perfect (2) can have future reference, which again proves the overlapping of various temporal functions for one and the same verbal form in English:

E.g. (1) ‘She’ll let you know when she herself finds out the details.’ (DS)

[I told you (that) she’d let you know when she herself found out.]

(RS)

(2) ‘After they’ve finished the project they’ll go on a vacation.’ (DS)

[Someone said (that) they’d go on a vacation after they had finish-

ed the project.] (RS)

Romanian, on the other hand, displays no tense alterations inside the same sentence, as illustrated in (1) and (2) or when moving from DS to RS:

E.g. (1) ‘Te va anunta cand va afla si ea.’ (DS)

[Ti-am spus ca te va anunta cand va afla si ea.] (RS)

(2)‘Dupa ce vor fi terminat/au terminat proiectul vor pleca in

vacanta. (DS)

[Cineva a spus ca vor pleca in vacanta dupa ce vor fi

terminat/au terminat proiectul.] (RS)

Nor are there such changes in Romanian in conditional sentences, or any other type of clauses:

E.g. (1) Daca nu te vei purta cuviioncios, nu te voi mai ajuta! (DS)

[Nu ti-am spus ca nu te voi mai ajuta daca nu te vei purta

cuviincios?](RS)

(2) Cineva va trebui sa preia initiativa, in cele din urma, spuse

Grace. (DS)

[Grace a spus ca cineva va trebui sa preia initiativa, pana la

urma.](RS)

English has two types of constraints here: 1) the sequence of tenses required by the canonical secondary clauses and 2) the backshifting specific to the Reported Speech:

E.g. (1) ‘If you don’t behave yourself, I won’t help you at all.’ (DS)

(Conditional Clause, type 1, Present Simple – Main Clause,

Simple Future)

[Didn’t I tell you (that) if you didn’t behave yourself, I wouldn’t

help you at all?] (RS)

(Past Simple, as RS backshift of the Present Simple above –

Future-In-the-Past, in the Main Clause)

(2) ‘Someone will have to take the initiative, after all,’ said Grace.

(DS) (Simple Future)

[Grace said (that) someone would have to take the initiative.]

(RS) (Future-in-the-Past imposed by the RS constraints)

There are four cases where these alterations are not possible or logical, but only one applies here: when the situation in the reported utterance still holds true at the time of the indirect report, no changes are required, irrespective of the form of the reporting verb:

E.g. ‘The next big depression will be in 2025,’ said Mr. Snyder. (DS)

Mr. Snyder said (that) the next big depression will be in 2025. (IS)

Furthermore, when the reference time is more ambiguous, the usage of the future time forms is divided between will and would, while when these forms involve inference or prediction, shifting is even more unlikely to occur, because a change in form will bring about a change in meaning (i.e. the degree of probability/certainty):

E.g. (1) ‘It will probably rain,’ announced the forecaster. (DS)

(2) [The forecaster announced (that) it would probably rain.] (RS)

The degree of probability/certainty differs from (1) – where it is higher, to (2) – where it is lower.

The most appropriate teaching strategies and techniques I have experienced so far are those that expose students to a lot of input containing indirectly indirect speech. To put it more clearly, it would be of great help to elicit comments in a future form on various topics (content-based and task-based approaches) which the teacher will have to change into the RS.

Another procedure which can be adapted to pedagogical purposes belongs to the Community Language Learning approach. The teacher can invite students to have a conversation, on a particular topic, each line of it being recorded on a chart, and subsequently changed into the RS by the teacher. Students are then invited to make observations about the differences within English, first, and between Romanian and English, afterwards. (See the Ch. IV and V, section E)

IV METHODS, STRATEGIES AND TECHNIQUES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING/TEACHING

IV.1 What does “learning” mean? Introduction

Starting with a general definition of learning (the “alteration of behaviour as a result of individual experience or when an organism can perceive and change its behaviour, it is said to learn” ) we could easily observe the truth-content of it inside the phenomena of language learning and, what is more, inside the phenomenon called foreign language learning, which is precisely the core of this paper.

For a better grasp of the language learning/teaching concept, as well as for the sense of history that each and every teacher should have when it comes to their profession, a brief survey of the various methodological options will be given. (Marianne Celce-Murcia, Teaching English As a Second or Foreign Language, page 3)

IV.2 A brief survey of the trends before the 20^th century

Prior to the twentieth century, language teaching methodology oscillated between two kinds of approaches: getting students to put a language in use, which means, speaking and understanding a language vs. getting learners to analyse a language, i.e. to assimilate its grammatical rules.

During the classical Greek and mediaeval Latin periods there was a great emphasis on foreign language learning. The two classical languages, Greek and Latin, were used as lingua francas, which means that higher learning was conducted primordially in these two languages, all over Europe. They were used in philosophy, religion, politics and, business. In consequence, the educated elite became fluent speakers and writers of one or both languages.

These being the circumstances, a question arises: which were their approaches to convey the form and the meaning of the language they were teaching? We can only assume that their approaches were informal and more or less direct and that they used aural-oral techniques with no language textbooks, but rather a simple collection of hand-copied manuscripts, containing texts in the target language and lexicons with words listed side by side in the two languages (L1 and L2).

Later on, during the Renaissance, the formal study of the grammars of Greek and Latin became popular through the spread of books, thanks to the invention of the printing press. In the case of the classical Latin, it was discovered that the grammar of the classical texts was different from that of the Latin used as a lingua franca - the latter subsequently being labelled vulgate Latin, i.e., Latin of the common people.

Given the major differences developed between the classical Latin described in the Renaissance grammars, (the formal object of instruction in schools), and the Latin being used for everyday purposes, this language began to be abandoned in Western Europe.

This and the rise of various European vernaculars (which were continually gaining respectability and popularity) led to the necessity of learning the language of another country or region. The language study shifted back to utility rather than analysis during the 17^th century. The most famous language teacher and methodologist of that period was Johann Amos Comenius, a Czech scholar and teacher who stated that a revolution in methods of teaching was necessary so that learning might become rapid, pleasant, and thorough. Teachers ought to “follow in the footsteps of nature,” meaning that they ought to pay attention to the mind of the child and to the way the student learned. Comenius made this the theme of The Great Didactic and also of The School of Infancy—a book for mothers on the early years of childhood. Some of the techniques that Comenius used were:

Use imitation instead of rules to teach a language.

Have your students repeat after you.

Use a limited vocabulary initially.

Help your students practise reading and speaking.

Teach language through pictures to make it meaningful.

Thus, Comenius made explicit an inductive way of learning a foreign language, a goal of which was to teach use rather than analysis of the language being taught.

Even though Comenius’s views influenced learning techniques for some time, by the beginning of the 19^th century, the systematic study of the grammar of classical languages had once again taken over in schools and universities throughout Europe. The analytical Grammar-Translation Approach became firmly entrenched as a method for teaching not only Latin, but, by extension, modern languages as well.

However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Direct Method, which once more stressed the ability to use rather than to analyse a language as the goal of language instruction, had begun to function as a viable alternative to Grammar-Translation. This method became very popular in France and Germany, and has enthusiastic followers among language teachers even today (as does Grammar-Translation Approach).

In 1886, a new approach was settled by some scholars such as Henry Sweet, Wilhelm Viëtor, and Paul Passy, together with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), when they founded the International Phonetic Association. Thus, they became part of the Reform Movement in language teaching in the 1890s. Their contribution to language teaching was the first essentially scientific, establishing principles as follows:

The spoken form of a language is primary and should be taught first.

The findings of phonetics should be applied to language teaching.

Language teachers must have solid training in phonetics.

Learners should be given phonetic training to establish good speech habits

Even if the work of these phoneticians is not necessarily considered a major pedagogical approach to language teaching, its adherents did have an influence on a few future approaches, as it will be shown subsequently.

At the same time, and quite independently, the influence of the Direct Method grew, as soon as it crossed the Atlantic in the early 20^th century. A disciple of Gouin, Emilé de Sauzé, came to Cleveland to observe that all foreign language instruction in the public school there implemented the Direct Method. She was not completely successful in her attempt because of the lack of foreign language teachers who were fluent speakers of the language they taught.

Later, the Modern Language Association of America, based on the Coleman Report (Coleman 1929), supported the Reading Approach to language teaching, since given the skills and limitations of most language teachers, the least thing a learner could assimilate was the ability to read in the target language, with emphasis on some of the great works of literature and philosophy that had been produced in that language. This approach, however, had a powerful influence in the USA until the late 1930s and early 1940s, when World War II broke out and made it imperative for the US military to quickly teach foreign language learners how to speak and understand a language. Consequently, the US government hired linguists to help teach and develop materials: the Audiolingual Approach, which was based on structural linguistics (Bloomfield) and behavioural psychology (Skinner), was born.

In Great Britain the same historical pressures produced the Oral or Situational Approach. It advocated organising structures around situations that would provide the learner with maximum opportunity to practise the target language, with ‘practice’ nonetheless often being little more than choral repetition. There is a present assumption according to which both Audiolingualism in the US and the Oral-Situational Approach in Britain were largely influenced by the earlier Reform Movement.

IV.3 20^th Century Approaches to Language Teaching

As the 20th century witnessed profound changes in every domain, new approaches to teaching foreign languages were designed, as well, based on the pedagogical concepts of age and characteristic needs of the pupils. According to the teaching methods devised, one can distinguish several successive approaches:

• the grammar-translation method (GTM);

• the audio-lingual method (ALA);

• the communicative approach (CLT);

• the post-communicative turn (PCT);

Each of these was contested and rejected by subsequent generations, but all of them proved to contain strengths, as well as flaws, therefore if their techniques and procedures are used intertwined, they can prove successful.

3.1. The grammar-translation method (GMT)

Although this method is one of the oldest (it is also called “the classical method”), it is still used by teachers all over the world. Its principles and techniques are similar to those used for teaching “dead” languages, such as Latin or Greek.

As the name suggests, this method consists of vocabulary and grammar rules acquisition, with translation as the main operational technique. It was adequate for Latin or Greek learning, so it was intended for highly intellectual reasons, such as reading literature in the original or analyzing linguistic systems. Obviously, classes where this method was/is used are extremely rigid, the focus being on the decipherment of structure and on the memorization of conjugations and other morphological inflections and the like, in ongoing and tiring sessions, under the stern supervision of a teacher, ready to punish his/her students for mistakes, rather than praise them for good answers.

Here are some steps which a traditional grammar-translation lesson generally follows:

•teacher’s model reading of the text

•students’ reading (a paragraph or two for each student), with the teacher carefully correcting every mispronunciation;

•inscription, on the blackboard and in the students’ notebooks of the new words, in the form of long, bilingual lists; the students had to memorize the entire list;  

•deductive presentation of grammar: the rule was explained, then illustrated with other examples; practice followed;

•translation of the text into the students’ mother tongue, with insistence on the linguistic and stylistic subtleties of the text;

•reading comprehension questions, to check on and/or facilitate understanding of the text by the students;

•”re-telling” the story; the students had to memorize the informational content of the text, as well as long passages (quotations) from it; the teacher carefully corrected the students’ mistakes;

•translation into the target language; the text to be translated could be a summary of the original text, or some other text containing the newly acquired vocabulary and grammatical pat-tern(s);

•literary analyses of the text (i.e. a survey of the plot and the message, character portrayal, analyses of the writer’s style, etc.) to highlight the exceptional literary achievements;

•homework: a written summary of the text, a literary essay, translation, etc.

For the most part, this approach has strong points, inasmuch as it teaches vocabulary and grammar thoroughly; it also provides the students with large amounts of information concerning literature, culture and civilization; in addition, it develops the students’ analytical and critical spirit.

On the other hand, the GTM was attributed a number of flaws, as it focused mainly on reading and writing skills, considering speaking and listening of low importance. Firstly, spoken language is quite different from written language, in that the former is elliptical, idiomatic, and the latter has long and intricate constructs. Consequently, students were quite good at writing and reading, but failed in face-to-face interaction, as the language they studied was antiquated, being quite useless in the real-world situations, because they understood little or nothing of what was being said, nor could they “find their words” to express what they bore in their mind.

In the early 1940s, Charles Ewart Eckersley’s Essential English for Foreign Students revealed the drawbacks of the GTM, in two hilarious lessons, pointing to the shortcomings of this method. The lessons described two English learners’ first day in London: Frieda, a young woman from Switzerland, who gets lost in Hyde Park and who, despite her knowing to ask for directions in English, does not understand a word of what people are telling her in reply; she is eventually saved by a French-speaking policeman; the other foreigner is Hob, from the non-definite Ruritania, who has a frustrating experience in the restaurant because he cannot make the waiter understand his order. The two characters lack certain skills (the woman lacks listening skills and the man lacks speaking, more exactly, pronunciation skills), this fact pointing to the absence of communicative abilities development.

3.2. The audio-lingual approaches (ALA)

Given the poor linguistic performances of GTM students in the real world, educators realize that their method was not efficient and that significant changes were required to make language teaching operational. They identified students’ need and sensed that foreign language learners had to be equipped with a different kind of knowledge, of which they could successfully make use in communicative situations. This need was the outcome of a new reality – globalization – when people of different nationalities had to share a common language in order to understand each other. The result? A new approach in teaching a foreign language was born, being at the same time a reaction of rejection and negation of the previous generations’ methods.

To be fully accurate, some clarifications should be provided: this innovative teaching approach was, in fact, used sporadically along history, when educators showed that teaching need not be strict, coercive or punitive, but cooperative and friendly. As far as antiquity, Aristotle founded a new sort of school, his Lyceum, where his students, (called “peripatetics” from the name of the cloister - peripatos - in which they walked and held their discussions), could take part in courses where there were no other constraints, but “the intellectual discipline”. [50]

Similarly, in the 18^th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau urged to teach children in a “back-to-nature” way: in his Émile: ou, de l'éducation, 1762, he speaks about the education of a young boy by letting him discover the world and himself freely, with only a slight guidance from his tutor. This approach scandalised the pious Jansenists of the French Parlements, who ordered that Rousseau should be arrested because of this work; he eventually escaped from France, which obviously meant the lack of success of his treatise on education.

It was only in the 20^th century and thanks to the educationalists’ observation of the way young children acquire their mother tongue, that teachers suggested teaching foreign languages by using it exclusively. No explanation or translation into the students’ mother tongue was allowed in classes; instead, all the explanation was provided in the target language enabling direct association of perception and thought with the foreign speech and sound; hence, meanings were explained with the help of the visuals, realia , paralanguage and demonstration. These were the principles that Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz[52] put forth for his direct method of teaching languages, which subsequently proved to be rather ineffective for public education, with its large groups of students.

Still, the ALM adopted these principles, being also indebted to the two main principles of the age:

Ø   the structural view, according to which things can be broken into “atoms”, their basic elements;

Ø   the behavioural concept, according to which language is a form of behaviour.

As suggested above, this method, too, has both merits and drawbacks. On one hand, it has several techniques, still in use nowadays, all of them sharing a common denominator: their emphasis on the oral communicative skills, which meant this method aimed to endow language learners with a kind of competence similar to that of a native speaker.

In addition, part from the new techniques and procedures, as well as the aims of this method, teachers’ attitude underwent major changes: from the dominant figure in front of the class, to the more cooperative educator, who no longer dominates his/her class, but mingles with the learners and participates in their activities as this method involved a lot of listen/repeat exercises, transformation drills, and positive reinforcement.

On the other hand, it brought about less rigour in the writing skills because of a poorer ability in handling structure and organising ideas.

3.3. The communicative approach (CLT);

The methods described so far are symbolic of the progress foreign language teaching ideology underwent in the last century. These were methods that came and went, influenced or gave birth to new methods – in a cycle that can be described as competition between rival methods or passing fads in the methodological theory underlying foreign language teaching. By mid-eighties, a new method took shape (Communicative Language Teaching), as it became clear that endless drills and repetitions were not able to meet the requirements of the age for competent communicators.

The Communicative approach does a great amount of work to expand on the goal of creating communicative competence compared to earlier methods that professed the same objective.  In contrast with the previously described approaches, teaching students how to use the language is considered to be at least as important as learning the language itself.  Brown (1994:77) aptly describes the transition towards CLT:

'Beyond grammatical discourse elements in communication, we are probing the nature of social, cultural, and pragmatic features of language.  We are exploring pedagogical means for 'real-life' communication in the classroom.  We are trying to get our learners to develop linguistic fluency, not just the accuracy that has so consumed our historical journey.  We are equipping our students with tools for generating unrehearsed language performance 'out there' when they leave the womb of our classrooms.  We are concerned with how to facilitate lifelong language learning among our students, not just with the immediate classroom task.  We are looking at learners as partners in a cooperative venture.  And our classroom practices seek to draw on whatever intrinsically sparks learners to reach their fullest potential.'

Looking carefully into what Brown stated, one could identify several types of learning associated with CTL, as follows:

Interactive Learning

This concept goes right to the heart of communication itself, stressing the dual roles of 'receiver' and 'sender' in any communicative situation.  Interaction creates the 'negotiation between interlocutors' which in turn produces meaning (semantics). The concept of interactive learning necessarily entails that there will be a lot of pair and group work in the classroom, as well as genuine language input from the 'real world', for meaningful communication;

→when applying this method, the teacher sets up a communicative activity whose stated reasons and purposes are of great importance in having them practice a foreign language, as they will pay more attention not only to what they say, but, equally important, to how they say it. Therefore, both pupils’ and the teacher’s roles are essentially different from their traditional ones.

Learner-centered Learning: 

This kind of instruction involves the giving over of some 'power' in the language learning process to the learners themselves.  It also strives to allow for personal creativity and input from the students, as well as taking into account their learning needs and objectives;

→although the teacher may seem to have a peripheral role in the learning process, he/she still provides guidance and help, especially to those who are slow in developing communicative independence, or he/she may be part of the communicative act itself.

Cooperative Learning: 

This concept stresses the 'team' like nature of the classroom and emphasizes cooperation as opposed to competition.  Students share information and help, and achieve their learning goals as a group;

→ the communicative teacher is a needs analyst, an organizer and a manager of class activities, and occasionally, an error corrector. He/She helps students internalize language as their personal experience so that it become meaningful and important. During the supervision of the class interaction, s/he facilitates interaction among the students, including every student in the communicative act.

Content-based Learning (CBL): 

This type of learning joins language learning to content/subject matter and engages them both concurrently. Language is seen as a tool or medium for acquiring knowledge about other things, instantly proving its usefulness.  An important factor in this kind of learning is that the content itself determines what language items need to be mastered, not the other way around.  When students study math or science using English as the medium, they are more intrinsically motivated to learn more of the language.

→ there are issues in implementing CBL. A central issue is the extent to which focusing on content provides sufficient basis for the development of the language skills. There are findings according to which when English is used for teaching school subjects (others than English itself), students tend to overlook grammatical accuracy in favour of mastering the content rather than developing accurate language use.

Task-based Learning (TBL): 

This concept equates the idea of a 'learning task' to a language learning technique in itself.  This could be a problem solving activity or a project, or anything that engages the students in learning activities, thus the task has a clear objective, appropriate content, a working/application procedure, and a set range of outcomes. Professor Jack C. Richards[54], a specialist in second and foreign language teaching, identifies two kinds of tasks:

→ Pedagogical tasks, in which students are required to use specific types of language (skills, grammar, vocabulary). Though the task itself is not something that one could normally meet in the real world, the interaction it requires provides useful input to language acquisition.

→ Real-world tasks, those that reflect real-world uses of language and which may be a preamble for real-world tasks. A role play in which the students practise a job interview would be a task of this kind.

As with every theory, this approach raises a number of issues, too. It seems to work not more effectively than the P-P-P approach the TBL tends to replace. Moreover, the criteria for selecting and sequencing tasks are also problematic, as is the problem of language accuracy and the task work may serve to develop fluency at the expense if accuracy. Content is also of little interest in TBL, TBL focusing on classroom processes, rather than on learning outcomes. These make TBL too vague to be widely adopted as a methodology.

Text-based Learning (Tx-BL):

Also known as genre-based approach, this approach focuses on the mastery of different types of texts. The text is used to refer to structured sequences of language that are employed in specific contexts in specific ways, therefore, communicative competence involves being able to use different kinds of spoken and written texts in the specific contexts of their use. According to Feez and Joyce[55], Tx-BL is based on an approach that involves:

→ teaching explicitly about the structures and grammatical features of spoken and written texts;

→ linking spoken and written texts to the cultural context of their use;

→ designing units of work which focus on developing skills in relation to whole texts;

→ providing students with guided practice as they develop language skills for meaningful communication through whole texts.

The problems, however, with implementing a Tx-BL is that it concentrates on the product of learning, rather than on the processes involved. It is also stated that this approach lacks the emphasis on individual creativity and personal expression, as language development follows model-oriented procedures. Furthermore, critics claim that this approach becomes repetitive, this leading to poor efficiency, due to the dullness of the routine.

Competency-based Learning (CBL):

This approach is characterised as focusing on the outcomes of learning as the guiding principle of teaching. Auerbach[56] distinguishes eight features involved in implementing CBL in language teaching:

Critics of CBL claim that analysing situations into tasks and underlying competences is not always attainable, qualifying this approach as being reductionist, since learning is reduced to a set of lists and things as thinking skills are bypassed. (Jake C Richards, op. cit. page 44)

3.4 The Post-communicative turn: the eclectic method vs. the effective method

Many teachers use a mixture of both Indirect and Direct Methods. Any eclectic method teachers adopt, it therefore falls between two stools. Either way, they face obstacles which make teaching/ learning both difficult and unpleasant (as it was described above with each method). What is needed, therefore, is a completely different method, which:

lies outside the range of Indirect/Direct methods which takes into account data procured by investigations into second language learning,

uses old/new teaching/learning activities in such a way so as to enable the learner to learn a language more quickly and with less effort,

gives pupils the opportunity to reach a level whereby he can 'think' in that language.

The new method in learning/teaching a foreign language that specialists hail is the so-called effective method, which needs, consequently, to fill the gaps that the other methods display. A list of drawbacks that this method needs to

It must be simple for both teacher and learner, and must be within the capabilities of all teachers. Also, the teacher must feel that pupils are progressing satisfactorily;

It must bring about a balance between the spoken and written or printed word (and must be flexible enough for the teacher to concentrate on the area (s)he wants);

It must overcome the conflict between fluency and accuracy;

It must increase the rate and amount of learning which takes place in the classroom;

Testing must be part of the method, and not a separate entity;

Constant revision must be part of the method;

It must enable the teacher to set defined limits and have control over oral responses;

It must be variable (cf. the difficulty of the Direct Method where framing the right question to make the pupils apply various persons/ tenses/cases and vocabulary is most difficult without pre-arranged coding);

It must reflect the linguistic habits the child has already acquired by learning his/her mother tongue and their ability to assimilate a new language;

It must offer a new approach to the application of translation work;

It must give the pupils a stimulus to say something in the first instance - and it must find ways of supplying the pupils constantly with ideas which they can use for their expression in the foreign language;

It must enable work done with modern teaching aids (e.g. audio-visual aids, computer) to be an extension of the method used in class;

It must give the teacher an opportunity to speed up inter-communication between himself/herself and individual pupils;

It must be sufficiently flexible to cope with various class conditions (as far as pupils' specific/general interests are concerned);

It must ensure that pupils are given the opportunity of having the greatest number of meaningful contacts possible both with and in the foreign language – the most important criteria for the validity of any modern method.

V ACTIVITIES USED DURING THE ENGLISH CLASSES FOR PRACTISING FUTURITY

‘Grasp the subject, the words will follow.’

(Cato the Elder)

The activities given below are partly taken from textbooks/workbooks of different levels of study, (from pre-intermediate to advanced), adapted to various communicative situations and, consequently, linguistic needs and partly designed by myself, especially the section addressed to the advanced learners of English (translations and activities to practise back-shifting). Each category of activities contains a comment that reveals the level of study to which it belongs, how each has been introduced to children and the effectiveness of the teaching approach I am proposing in this paper. The sources are given in the bibliography, except for the section I myself designed and which will be labelled as such.

A PRACTISING GOING To-FUTURE

1 Plans

New Year’s resolutions. Imagine it is New Year’s Eve.

a) Individual work: Think back about the year that is shortly finishing, decide three things which you want to change for the next year and write down three resolutions.

E.g. I have been a bit sloppy this year, but next year I’m going to be more organized.

b) Pair work: Choose a famous person (a politician, an artist etc.) and make a few resolutions for the next year. .

Present what you have written to another pair and guess the famous person.

E.g. I’m going to tell fewer lies to the newspapers. I’m going to get a better lawyer.

2 Intentions and ambitions

Match the two halves of the sentence to form ambitions and intentions:

3 Evidence

a) Group work: (five to six students in a group, taking turns.)

Watch the preparations we are doing and guess what we are going to do. Think of mimes for the class to guess what you are going to do. (Pour the tea in a cup, start the computer, etc.)

E.g. You are going to have a cup of tea/ do the dishes.

The group that guesses the most activities and has the most original mimes is the winner.

b) The class organized in two groups is challenged to guess what I am going to do, after listening to these sentences. The group that gets the most points is the winner:

I’ve put on my coat and hat. (I’m going to go for a walk.)

The phone is ringing. (I’m going to ignore it.)

I’ve got the ingredients. (I’m going to make a pie.)

I’ve bought two tickets. (I’m going to invite you on a trip with me.)

I’ve bought flowers. (I’m going to go to a funeral.)

It’s late and I’m tired. (I’m going to ask you to leave.)

I’ve got the tools. (I’m going to build a shed.)

There’s a bottle of wine on the table. (I’m going to open it.)

The kitchen’s full of dirty dishes. (I’m going to buy a dishwasher.)

I’m absolutely exhausted. (I’m going to have a cup of coffee.)

I’ve got a headache. (I’m going to lie down.)

It’s raining. (I’m going to bring the laundry in.)

There’s a great film on TV tonight. (I’m going to record it.)

I’m hungry. (I’m going to have some toast.)

I’ve lost my keys. (I’m going to climb in through my window.)

4 Policy statement

This type of activity can be used almost with every level of study, but especially with the upper-intermediate and advanced, as it does not focus on structure only, but it involves social science knowledge as well. I used it with 10^th graders and the acquisition proved to take place almost instantaneously, not to mention the excitement generated by such a topic.

Group work: The class will be divided into three groups, each representing a political party. The groups have to design their policies and present them to the other groups. For variation, the groups will heckle each other’s presentations. This is also a good opportunity to practice the reported counterparts was/were going to:

E.g. We’re going to tax more.

E.g. But you said you were going to cut taxes!

B PRACTISING the WILL-FUTURE

1 One day…

I’m going to make a prediction about the future. You’ll have to make yourselves predictions about the future and choose the one which is the most likely to happen and present it to your colleagues. We’ll make a chart with all the predictions and discuss each.

E.g. Computers will take over the world.

Time travel will be possible.

We will find life in other solar systems.

Babies will be genetically modified.

Disease will be eliminated.

People will live on Mars.

There will be no more war.

The environment will be destroyed.

Everyone will live to be 200.

We will learn how to travel at the speed of light.

Discussion: E.g. I think computers will take over the world because this technology is extremely rapidly developing.

The additional discussion of each prediction reinforces the effectiveness of using this form of future, as well as the ability of giving reasons.

2Time capsule

In small groups, agree on a list of ten objects to put in a time capsule. It will be opened in a thousand years’ time and the objects will show what life was in the 21^th century. Compare lists with another group and ask them to explain their choices (a training shoe, a bag of household rubbish, a bottle of mineral water, a tabloid newspaper, a music CD, a cigarette, a mobile phone, etc.):

E.g. Choosing a training shoe will tell them that people were very interested in doing sports.

The tabloid newspaper will suggest that people liked to read gossips about famous people very much.

3 Predictions

Although the present paper looks at the concept of futurity from the perspective of upper-intermediate & advanced ESL students, there are certain activities (such as this one) that can be adapted to pre-intermediate or intermediate learners. This activity has been practised so far with children aged 12-13, during an English optional class, and which has proved to be very efficient due to the learning technique used (there have been ‘real life’ instantiations’); it also resulted into a very pleasant class interaction due to the emotional and exciting content of the topic. Students have been shown a poster containing a palm drawn so that the details (the ‘lines’) read easily. They are also given the significances of the lines typology and the task below.

Work with a partner and read each other’s palms according to these principles. Read the palm of the hand your partner doesn’t write with:

E.g. You’ll have a long, adventurous life.

4 Hopes

In pairs, tell each other about your hopes and plans for the future, including marriage, ambitions, home, travel and work. Use the expressions I’m going to write on the board for you:

5 Spontaneous decisions

I’m going to make an announcement which you will like very much. We’re going to have a party next week. What will you bring or do? Let’s write a preparation plan!

E.g. I’ll bring a CD with the music I like most

6 Two friends

Imagine two friends are having a conversation. I’ll tell you what one of them says, and you suggest a helpful response:

E.g. A: ‘My car won’t start.’ B: ‘I’ll give you a lift.’

C PRACTISING THE CONTINUOUS/PROGRESSIVE WILL-FUTURE

1 Future on-going activities

In pairs, ask and answer questions about what you’ll be doing at these times:

• this time tomorrow, • this time next week, • this time next month, • this time next year, • in ten years’ time, • when I see you again, • at 5 P.M. tomorrow.

E.g. A: ‘What will you be doing (this time) tomorrow?’

B: ‘I’ll be relaxing at home.’

2 My future

In pairs, copy the table and fill it in for your partner by asking him/her questions:

E.g. Where will you be working in ten years’ time?

D PRACTISING FUTURE PERFECT SIMPLE AND CONTI-NUOUS

These activities are designed especially for upper-intermediate and advanced students because they focus both on using a certain linguistic pattern (sequence of tenses, the perfective aspect of will-future) and on giving arguments for each statement.

1 In groups in there or four, discuss the changes you expect by the end of the 21^st century. Appoint a secretary and write a short paragraph about each one.

E.g. Scientists will have discovered a new way to travel.

Here are some verbs to help you:

2 Join the following sentences using future perfect simple in the main clause and simple present in the secondary clause, according to the model:

Model: The Bartons have dinner at seven thirty. Their friends are going to call on them at eight thirty.

The Bartons will have had dinner by the time their friends call on them.

a) The play starts at 7:00. We’ll get to the theatre at 6:30.

b) Nick is going to buy a camera before he starts on a trip around the country.

c) He’ll see many interesting places during his trip. When he comes back he’ll tell us about them.

d) Mrs Adams has not finished reading the library book yet. She has to return it to the library today.

e) Betty is at the seaside now. She’ll return before September 15^th.

3 Put the verbs in brackets into a suitable tense form so that you express a future meaning:

a) By the time John comes back, I ………………(finish) my work.

b) At this time in two days I ………………(fly) over the Pacific.

c) I’m visiting the exhibition before it …………….. (close) tomorrow.

d) What do you think you ……………….. (do) this time next week?

e) Some friends ………………….. (come) for the weekend.

f) We ………………. (finish) the repairs to your car by tomorrow morning.

g) By the time the doctor ……………. (arrive), the patient ……….. (die).

h) I don’t think she ………………… (wait) for you when you get there, if you don’t hurry up.

i) It …………… (not be) long before the manager arrives at the office.

3 This evening, at eight o’clock, your friends are going to pay you a visit. Tell me what you will have been doing by then:

E.g. By 8 o’clock I’ll have been reading the latest issue of my favourite

magazine.

E PRACTISING VARIOUS VERB FORMS WITH FUTURE TIME REFERENCE:

The activities given here are intended for upper-intermediate and advanced learners of English, due to their high level of difficulty. In order to be coherent and relevant, I have chosen a gradual display of these activities in point of their difficulty.

1 Complete this email confirming travel details for someone from Milan who is visiting you in London. Use the words given in each sentence.

2 Put the verb in the present continuous (e.g. they’re going) or the present simple (e.g. I see):

3 Rewrite the following sentences so that they contain the words in capitals and the meaning stays the same:

1) It’s likely that he will come to the party.

(bound)

2) She is on the verge of resigning.

.. (about)

3) He has the intention of leaving Romania for good.

.. (is)

4) The building of the new block of flats is scheduled to begin next week.

(due)

5) An electrical engineer will fix my telly.

.. (have)

6) He is bound to finish the work on time.

.. (likely)

7) The arrangements are that the race should start at 10 o’clock in the morning.

. (starts)

8) Who will help you finish this job?

(working)

9) The doctor is on the verge of making an important discovery.

.. (point)

10) She is expecting.

(have)

4 Put the verb into the more suitable form, present continuous or present simple:

5 Choose the right form of the verbs. There may be two right answers sometimes. Explain your choice(s). You may have to make some changes:

6 Choose the correct future form:

1) I booked some tickets last week. I‘ll/’m going to take my niece to the ice skating.

2) Pavarotti, the Opera singer, is singing/sings at the stadium on the 27^th at 8pm.

3) How can I help? O.K. I call/‘ll call the Police straight away.

4) In my diary it says that he‘s coming/‘ll come round a week today.

5) My mother doesn’t usually ring / isn’t usually ringing on Tuesdays.

6) Are you going to/Do you bring your new girlfriend like last time?

7) We’d better leave early in case the traffic is/is going to be bad.

8) I‘m going to /’ll give you a lift if you like.

9) By the year 2500 I think we‘ll all be living/‘re all living on the moon.

10) Do you think we’ll be solving/have solved the problem of global warming by the end of the century?

7 Write the future form of the verb in brackets:

1 AC Milan _______________ (play) at the stadium on the 27^th at 8pm.

2 Is there a problem. O.K. I _______________ (call) the Police straight away.

3 I need to go now because I _______________ (take) my niece to the ice skating.

4 ____________________(you/bring) your new girlfriend like last time?

5 Let’s go now in case the traffic _______________(be) bad.

6 I _______________ (give) you a lift if you like.

7 By the year 2500 I think we _______________ (live) in space.

8 Do you think we _______________ (solve) the problem of global warming by the end of the century?

9 In my diary it says that they _______________ (arrive) at midday.

10 The post normally _______________ (arrive) at ten.

8 Choose the right variant to complete the text:

A) Here in Augusta the final day of the US Golf Masters a) is on the verge of begin, and we could be

b) is sure to

c) is about to

a) on the verge of a historic win. Tiger Woods, who a) is on the point of start his bid for a place in the

b) bound to b) is due to

c) likely to c)is unlikely to

history books in forty minutes, could complete the grand slam – winning all four golf masters tournaments in one year. Woods starts today in the lead and he is a) on the verge of give up that lead

b) unlikely to

c) certain to

easily.

This is going to be an exciting day, folks, so be a) sure to book your place in front of the TV and settle  

b) due to

c) bound to

down for a thrilling day's viewing!

B) Hollywood's king and queen - Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts –a) are on the point of star opposite

b) are to

c) are bound to

each other in Ridley Scott's new blockbuster. No interviews or press releases are a) unlikely , but

b) imminent

c) bound

rumour has it that the film will be another Roman epic, following hot on the heels of the success of 'Gladiator', Scott's last film. Filming a) is on the point of start in September, but because of other

b) is due to

c) is on the verge of

commitments the two stars are a) sure not to join the set until next year. One thing is certain: with that

b) unlikely to

c) not about to

combination of director and stars, the film is a) bound to be a success!

b) due to

c) on the verge of

9 Put the verbs in brackets into a suitable tense form so that you express a future meaning:

a) By the time John comes back, I ………………(finish) my work.

b) At this time in two days I ………………(fly) over the Pacific.

c) I’m visiting the exhibition before it …………….. (close) tomorrow.

d) What do you think you ……………….. (do) this time next week?

e) Some friends ………………….. (come) for the weekend.

f) We ………………. (finish) the repairs to your car by tomorrow morning.

g) By the time the doctor ……………. (arrive), the patient ……….. (die

h) I don’t think she ………………… (wait) for you when you get there, if you don’t hurry up.

i) It …………… (not be) long before the manager arrives at the office.

j) Will you call on me as soon as you ………………… (find) out results of the test?

i) The plane won’t take off until the fog. (lift

j) Shall I boil the baby’s milk?~

k) Yes, but don’t give it to him till it (cool

l) Oh, this bridge is so long that by the time we.. (reach) the other end it will be time to start again at this end.

10 Choose the right variant in the parentheses to complete the letter:

11 Use future or present, simple, perfect or continuous to refer to future activities:

12 Time clauses:

This type of exercise can be introduced to students from pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate/advanced levels of study on condition the language is adapted to their linguistic/cognitive skills.

Put the verbs in brackets into the correct tense:

Heat the oil till it (begin) to smoke.

I’ll stay here till Tom (get) back.

We’ll go out as soon as the shops (open).

You drive first, and when you (be) tired, I’ll take over.

The sooner we (start), the sooner we’ll get there.

We will send you the goods as soon as we (receive) your cheque.

I’ll wait as long as you (like).

Whip the whites of the eggs till they (be) quite stiff.

Shall I jump out when the bus (slow) down at the next corner?~

No, you’d better wait until it (stop) at the traffic lights.

By the time you (give) the children their meal you won’t have any appetite left.

My instructor says that when I (fly) another ten hours, he’ll let me fly solo.

They say that when the 100 k.p.h. speed limit (be) in operation for a year, they will be able to judge whether it is effective or not.

The communicative situations given below are destined to the advanced learners of English, since they require a complete comprehension of the functions/speech acts that future forms encode so that students will be able to choose the most appropriate form:

14 Complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence, using the words given. Do not change the word given:

15 Using the words in parentheses, complete the text below with the appropriate tenses:

1. Right now, I am watching TV. Tomorrow at this time, I (watch) TV as well.
2. Tomorrow after school, I (go) to the beach.
3. I am going on a dream vacation to Tahiti. While you (do) paperwork and (talk) to annoying customers on the phone, I (lie) on a sunny, tropical beach. Are you jealous?
4. We (hide) when Tony (arrive) at his surprise party. As soon as he opens the door, we (jump) out and (scream) , 'Surprise!'
5. We work out at the fitness center every day after work. If you (come) over while we (work) out, we will not be able to let you into the house. Just to be safe, we (leave) a key under the welcome mat so you will not have to wait outside.
6. While you (study) at home, Magda (be) in class.
7. When I (get) to the party, Sally and Doug (dance) , John (make) drinks, Sue and Frank (discuss) something controversial, and Mary (complain) about something unimportant. They are always doing the same things. They are so predictable.
8. When you (get) off the plane, I (wait) for you.
9. I am sick of rain and bad weather! Hopefully, when we (wake) up tomorrow morning, the sun (shine) .

10. If you (need) to contact me sometime next week, I (stay)

at the Sheraton in San Francisco.

16 The following text is taken from a speech given by John F. Kennedy (dedicating the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College). Comment on its content observing the parallel phrases that pile up meaning in rhythmical waves and comparing the content to the subsequent social and political evolution:

‘I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.’

Amherst, Massachusetts October 26, 1963

17 Some of the sentences below are Future in the Past and some are examples of other verb forms which look similar but have entirely different meanings. Identify which sentences are Future in the Past and which are not: 

EXAMPLE:

A) She told me she would be there. YES
B) She would come if she had time. NO  

1. He was always going to the beach when he was a kid.

2. They knew he was going to go to the beach.

3. She would travel if she had enough money.

4. Sam thought he would win the contest.

5. Donna mentioned that she was going to go to Hawaii on vacation.

6. Judy was going to the beach when I called.

7. Judy was going to go to the beach when I called.

8. She would always go to class late.

9. She was always going to class late.

10. My parent knew I would go to class late.

11. Sally asked if I was going to go to class late.

12. I told Sue I was having dinner with some friends after work.

13. I told Sue I was going to have dinner with some friends after work.

14. When I worked there, we were always having production problems.

15. Was she aware of the fact that we were meeting after class.

18 Translate into Romanian these sentences, after you have established the time reference of each predicate. Compare and contrast the use of tenses in both languages.

1. I asked them if we could miss a payment or two.
2. The Groundhog Club was assured that the baby groundhogs could be accepted..
3. He had a firm belief that the United States must insist on its national identity..
4. He opposed a continuance of petitions to the British crown, declaring that they would inevitably meet with a humiliating rejection.
5. The 1961 Freedom Rides demonstrated that neither King nor Kennedy could control the expanding protest movement.
6. The owners found that more people could attend night games.
7. Then Annie got the crazy idea that she could talk me into buying a farm.
8. The season was over. I knew they'd send me back down. I couldn't bear
9. Volk said Amtrak will be a part of the transportation center
10. (The) MTD managing director said ground will be broken on the 60,000 square foot
11. He said that when a snake got the first whiff of Irish air he would die
12. Rost also said the center will result in more retail traffic
13. They didn't think his legacy would stand the test of time.
14. It’s not exactly the same as they thought it was going to be but few leave without .
15. So, I thought you two were going to watch some game.
16. He again took Hamilton's view that the United States should completely disregard .
19 Compare the two fragments in point of tenses and label the function(s) of each form: warning, promise, threat, certainty, prediction, real/unreal condition:

«Therefore, son of man, say to your countrymen, ‘The righteousness of the righteous man will not save¹ him when he disobeys², and the wickedness of the wicked man will not cause³ him to fall when he turns⁴ from it. The righteous man, if he sins⁵, will not be allowed⁶ to live because of his former righteousness.’

13 If I tell⁷ the righteous man that he will surely live⁸, but then he trusts in his righteousness and does evil, none of the righteous things he has done will be remembered⁹; he will die¹⁰ for the evil he has done.

14 And if I say to the wicked man, ‘You will surely die¹¹,’ but he then turns away from his sin and does what is just and right –

15 if he gives¹² back what he took in pledge for a loan, returns¹³ what he has stolen, follows¹⁴ the decrees that give life, and does¹⁵ no evil, he will surely live¹⁶; he will not die¹⁷. 16 None of the sins he has committed will be remembered against¹⁸ him. He has done what is just and right; he will surely live¹⁹.»

(The Bible, Ezekiel, 33:12-16)

12 «De aceea, tu, fiu al omului, spune copiilor poporului tau: „Dreptatea celui drept nu-l va scapa in ziua faradelegii lui; si cel rau nu va cadea lovit de rautatea lui, in ziua cand se va intoarce de la ea, nici cel drept nu va putea sa traiasca prin dreptatea lui in ziua cand va pacatui.

13 Cand voi zic celui drept ca va trai negresit, daca el se va increde in dreptatea lui si face ce este rau, nici una din faptele lui drepte nu va mai fi amintita, ci el va muri in nedreptatea pe care a facut-o.

14 Dimpotriva, cand zic celui rau: “Vei muri negresit!” si el se intoarce de la pacatul lui, si face ce este bine si drept,

15 daca cel rau da inapoi garantia, restituie ce a furat, urmeza invataturile vietii si nu face nimic rau, va trai negresit si nu va muri.

16 Niciunul din pacatele pe care le-a facut nu va fi amintit impotriva lui; a facut ce este bine si drept, va trai negresit.»

(Biblia, Ezechiel, 33:12-16

20 Translate into Romanian and explain the choice of the tense(s) you made as the counterpart(s) of the underlined forms below:

“No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?”

Dorian looked at Campbell. “How long will your experiment take, Alan?” he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.

Campbell frowned and bit his lip. “It will take about five hours,” he answered.

“It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half past seven, Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can have the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want you.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the man, leaving the room.

“Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is! I’ll take it for you. You bring the other things.” He spoke rapidly and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They left the room together.

“Don’t mind me, harry, I am irritable, and out of temper. I shall come round and see you tomorrow, or next day. Make my excuses to Lady Narborough. I shan’t go upstairs. I shall go home,. I must go home.”

“All right, Dorian. I dare say I shall see you tomorrow at tea-time. The duchess is coming.

“I will try to be there, Harry,” he said, leaving the room. »

(Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray, Ch.15 )

21 Translate into English paying attention to the sequence of tenses:

Nu ti-am spus ca nu ne vom intoarce decat dupa ce s-a incheiat conferinta de presa?

Stia ca aveam sa ne intoarcem atunci cand toate ranile se vor fi vindecat, cand totul va fi capatat un alt sens.

Faptele sunt fapte si ele nu vor disparea numai pantru ca asa iti convine tie.

Si-a dat seama ca succesul nu va fi etern si nici esecul nu va fi fatal.

Susan l-a avertizat pe Bill ca n-o sa fie acasa, ci se va plimba prin parc toata

ziua.

De ce ma intrebi cum o sa-mi petrec saptamana viitoare? Stii bine ca voi face curatenie in toata casa.

Ti-am transmis ca daca ma vei cauta maine la birou, n-ai sa dai de mine: voi fi acasa, cu un roman bun politist si un martini.

Maria i-a promis solemn ca se va imbraca in alb la petrecerea de absolvire, insa doar daca va primi bani sa isi cumpere rochia potrivita.

Nu a vrut sa recunoasca faptul ca va trebui sa renunte la scoala de indata ce se va intoarce sotul ei din strainatate.

10) “ -Daruieste-mi viata, Pasarila, ca te-oi darui si eu cu mila si cu daruri

imparatesti…” (I. Creanga, Harap-Alb)

This last section of practice is designed by myself and is addressed to upper-intermediate – advanced students, due the level of difficulty each activity displays.

VI CONCLUSIONS

Throughout this paper I have attempted to give a picture of the grammatical phenomenon called futurity, both in the English and the Romanian languages. Quite surprisingly, while researching for the paper, I have encountered some inconsistencies (especially in connection with the topic of my paper) in the literature that deals with the English verbal system, not to mention the lack of attention directed towards the correlation(s) between the formal and functional aspects of the concept ‘futurity’ and their acquisition. Therefore, I have analysed the grammatical devices that English and Romanian employ to render futurity, focusing on those variations in form and their semantics, (inside each), that are usually felt by students as a gruelling endeavour when acquiring them, and, most of all, when one language needs to mirror in the other, since there is little overlapping between the two languages.

Another attempt has been that of reorganizing the entire concept, so that its acquisition will become easier: students are no longer exposed to the dullness of ‘a grammar lesson’, but they are accompanied through speech acts into com-municating, into putting language into use, rather than into learning about grammar, about this and that in the grammar of a language. The activities I gave in Ch. V cover the most striking differences between English and Romanian, thus highlighting the nuances each language carries and allowing ESL students to become capable of coping with communicative needs of such nature.

One ruling principle I have followed has been that of correlating each explanation I have given with the cognitive particularities of the students to whom this paper is destined. There are findings in psycholinguistics according to which some aspects of futurity can be learned at a later stage than the others, e.g. those forms that display multiple (modal/temporal) functions. (See infra, Ch. II)

All through my work I have kept in mind the clarity, cohesion and relevance principle, because I started with the expectation this paper would make some linguistic aspects clearer not only for my students, but for myself, as well (and which it did). Consequently, its purpose has been/is to make teaching and learning these ‘chunks’ of language easier and more challenging, all for the communicative competence, which is the ultimate goal.

VII BIBLIOGRAPHY

BARBER, CHARLES, EARLY MODERN ENGLISH, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997

BRANDOM, ROBERT B., BETWEEN SAYING AND DOING, TOWARDS AN ANALYTIC PRAGMATISM, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008

CARTER, RONALD, HUGHES, REBECCA and McCARTHY, MICHAEL, EXPLORING GRAMMAR IN CONTEXT, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000

CHAPMAN, SIOBHAN, PHILOSOPHY FOR LINGUISTS: An Introduction, Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2000

CHESTERMAN, ANDREW, CONTRASTIVE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS, in PRAGMATICS & BEYOND – NEW SERIES, 1998

CONSTRUCTIONAL APPROACHES TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR, MOUTON de GRUYTER, BERLIN – NEW YORK, 2008

CRUSE, ALAN, A GLOSSARY OF SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006

CRYSTAL, DAVID, THE ENGLISH ENGLISH LANGUAGE, BCA, 1994

CULPEPER, JONATHAN, HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, Workbooks; 2nd Ed., 2005

DECLERCK, RENAAT, WHEN-CLAUSES AND TEMPORAL STRUCTURE, THE TAYLOR&FRANCIS e-LIBRARY, 2005

DEICTIC CONCEPTUALISATION OF SPACE, TIME AND PERSON, PRAGMATICS & BEYOND – NEW SERIES, VOLUME 112, 2003

DIXON, R.M.W., A SEMANTIC APPROACH TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005

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FISCHER, OLGA, MORPHOSYNTACTIC CHANGE, FUNCTIONAL AND FORMAL PERSPECTIVES, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2007

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GIORGI, ALESSANDRA and PIANESI, FABIO, TENSE AND ASPECT-FROM SEMANTICS TO MORPHOSYNTAX, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997

GöRLACH, MANFRED, TEXT TYPES AND THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH, MOUTON de GRUYTER, BERLIN/NEW YORK, 2004

GRIFFITHS, PATRICK, AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006

HICKMANN, MAYA, CHILDREN’S DISCOURSE – PERSON, SPACE AND TIME, CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004

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ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY USED IN CH. V:

CELCE-MURCIA, MARIANNE & LARSEN-FREEMAN, DIANE, THE GRAMMAR BOOK, HEINLE & HEINLE PUBLISHERS, 1998

GREENBAUM, SIDNEY, THE OXFORD ENGLISH GRAMMAR, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996

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SIDE, RICHARD, GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY FOR CAMBRIDGE ADVANCED AND PROFICIENCY, LONGMAN, 1999

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VINCE, MICHAEL, ADVANCED LANGUAGE PRACTICE, MACMILLAN, 2003

WEBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.bbcactiveenglish.com/

https://www.bbclearningenglish.com/

www.english-test.net

https://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/edtech/strategy.html#Pr