When you answer this question, you should probably use would to make it clear you are speaking hypothetically: you probably don't have any immediate plans to go to New York for a day, so this is only imaginary.

We have two main ways of speaking hypothetically in English:

• we can use would, as in, I would visit Times Square for sure.

• we can use past simple, as in If I went to New York for a day, I would definitely visit Times Square. We only use past simple immediately after certain words and phrases, for example after the word if.

Careful! In English, we need to change the grammar a little bit if the imaginary situation we're talking about would have taken place in the past. Here's how we do it:

• instead of just using would, we use would + have + the III form. For example, we can say, As a child, I would have loved to travel to the States, but my parents never took me. (I was a child in the past, so the hypothetical situation is in the past)

• instead of using past simple after words such as if, we will use past perfect. If my parents had taken me to New York when I was a child, I would have been super happy.

Can you find an example of this structure in the previous task?

How to use this page

1. Share your screen with this page open and work through the tasks together with the student. This way, however, your student will not be able to use the interactive elements!

2. OR Share a link to this page with your student. You can each look at the page on your own screen as you work through the tasks. You could also ask your student to share their screen so you know for sure they're looking at the right thing. This way, you can take full advantage of the interactive tasks.

3. If you have another structure in mind for the lesson, you can copy the link to a particular task and share this with your student so they don't get lost looking for it. Simply click on the little link symbol next to the task title to copy the link to the section.

How to plan this lesson

1. I have laid out the tasks in a way which I have found makes sense. The instructions I have provided should make it easy to run this lesson with a group or a one-to-one student.

2. Feel free to change the order of the tasks or the instructions to suit your class! If you approach any of the tasks differently, or combine this lesson with other interesting resources, I'd love to hear about it. Leave your ideas in the feedback form at the bottom of this page.

3. The blue-green section with the little arrow (If you only had one day in New York, what would you do?) is hidden until you click on the arrow. This is to make it easier to cut it from the lesson if you don't want to focus on speaking and not get into the grammar, or if you don't have time. You can also ask your students to explore this for homework.

4. If you want more tasks to supplement this lesson, revise the material or assign homework, I've added some fun material below, under Additional Material.

Who this is for

This lesson is aimed at students around B2 level. You can still run this lesson with B1 level students, but you may need to support them a little more with the vocabulary. I suggest you pre-teach some of the phrases (such as pickpocketing, skyline, overpriced, preconceived notions, filthy). For higher level students, you can skip the pre-teaching and simply double check if your students understand these words, or were able to guess their meaning from context.

This lesson may also work well for revising conditional structures (first and second conditional), but it's probably not the best way to introduce these to B1 students if they've never heard of them!

Sources

All of the photographs in this lesson are my own.