TESOL Zhuzhou

This unit covered conditionals and reported speech. I thought the rules about conditionals were interesting and important, because I hadn't realized the differences in conditionals so clearly before now. I think this would be something some students would struggle with, especially if their native language has different rules for how to use conditional-type phrases. I also thought the rules for reported speech were important, such as changing words for relative times like \"tomorrow\" or \"yesterday\". I would have liked to see more exceptions to the rules for changing the verb tenses in reported speech. I'm not sure if it's because I'm from America and we have different or more relaxed rules for this, but some of the verb changes seemed a little unnatural to me, and there were a few questions in this quiz where I was confused about which answer to choose. One example was the question where you have to change the sentence: Catherine said, ?I have never eaten octopus.? To me there were two possible correct answers; one where you change it to past perfect (as was recommended in the reading) or to keep it in present perfect if it were still the case that she has not tried octopus. Anyway, it was still a good exercise to question the way I thought of doing it, because I'm sure my students' textbooks probably follow a similar prescribed rule, and I don't want to go against the rule arbitrarily just because I think it sounds right my way.