‘Would rather’ for preference

Posted on August 9, 2008
Filed Under grammar, modal verbs, preference |

In my teaching environment I’m blessed with great Access to IT and my students have constant Access to the internet, consequently I use this as a teaching tool regularly in my classes. One thing I often do is a quick bit of googling to find a topic relevant to the grammar point my students are failing to grasp.This week I was left with the conundrum of bringing the would rather to show preference structure to life. What joy. Naturally, I wanted to avoid production of sentences such as ‘I’d rather not be here’ or ‘I’d rather I weren’t here.’ After literally seconds of searching I found this post on a website: Movies the US government would prefer people not watch. Mmmm… interest piqued. Would my students like to discuss such an issue? Now this instantly appeared to me to be a topic that would generate discussion, so what the hell, I went for it. The link basically lists 10 films that, er, the American government probably would rather their citizens didn’t see, and a jolly fine list it is, too. Along with the title of the film is a very brief synopsis and a link to IMDB.

What I did (after presentation of the structure):

Ask students to go to the site and read through the list.
Get them to discuss in groups why these films could cause controversy.
Feed back to rest of class, ‘the US government would rather people didn’t watch this film because…’

Reasons to be careful: