Marking Conditionals and Participial Adjectives in a Gap-Fill
A teacher is marking a 10-gap use-of-English task for B2 students. The extract reads: 'The council ___ (1) (approve) the plan last spring if the transport report ___ (2) (not / contain) two errors. As things stand, the new cycle route ___ (3) (build) by next June. The committee was ___ (4) (convince) that the errors were minor, despite ___ (5) (be) warned twice.' The key gives: (1) would have approved; (2) had not contained; (3) will be built; (4) convinced; (5) being. Spelling counts; contractions are accepted. Each gap is worth 1 point. One student writes: (1) approved; (2) didn't contain; (3) will have been built; (4) convincing; (5) being. The teacher must mark the script and explain the two main error clusters without turning feedback into a grammar lecture. The class has just finished a unit on conditionals, but participial adjectives were last term.
1. Which gaps are correct, and what exactly makes gaps 1 and 2 wrong? Use the time expression and cross-sentence evidence.
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Gap 5 is correct ('being' after 'despite'). Gap 3 is acceptable as written? No: the student wrote 'will have been built', which is also acceptable and is discussed below. Gaps 1, 2 and 4 are wrong. The time expression 'last spring' places the result in the past, and the next sentence, 'As things stand', tells us the plan was not approved; the condition is therefore counterfactual. English marks this with would have + past participle in the result and had + past participle in the if-clause: 'would have approved ... if the report had not contained'. The student's 'approved ... didn't contain' treats the sentence as a real past condition, but the co-text rules that out. The error is not a missing comma or a stray auxiliary; it is a failure to use cross-sentence evidence. Feedback should point to 'last spring' and 'As things stand' before naming the third conditional.
2. How would you explain gap 4 to the student in two or three sentences, with a contrastive example?
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Say: '-ed adjectives describe how a person feels; -ing adjectives describe the thing that produces the feeling. Ask: who feels convinced? The committee does, so 'convinced'. What caused the feeling? The report's evidence, so the report was 'convincing'.' Contrast: 'The committee was convinced by the report' vs 'The report was convincing'. A quick test: if the noun is a person or a group of people acting as people, -ed is usually right; if the noun is a thing or a cause, -ing is usually right. Note that 'committee' can take either logically, but here it means the members, so 'convinced' is correct. Keep the explanation to two sentences and one contrast pair; then give a second pair ('interested/interesting', 'confused/confusing') for retrieval practice.
3. The student claims gap 3 should be 'will have been built' and asks for the mark. How do you adjudicate?
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Award the mark. 'The new cycle route will be built by next June' and 'will have been built by next June' are both grammatical. The future perfect stresses completion before the deadline; the simple future passive presents the event as a fact that will happen by then. With 'by next June', the future perfect is more precise, but the simple passive is not an error. If the item is targeting the future passive, both should be keyed; if it is targeting the future perfect, the gap is under-specified because nothing in the co-text forces the perfect. The teacher should accept both, record the ambiguity, and revise the item so that a second time expression or a contrast (e.g., 'by the time the inspection begins') makes the target unambiguous.