Coulda, woulda shoulda…

Expressing regret is a must-have skill (for me) in any language. I am prone to accident and incident, and therefore a master of the “coulda’s, woulda’s, and shoulda’s” in the languages I learn and speak. The necessary grammatical structures, fortunately, limited in English, and the major ones can be found in this worksheet.

Use this worksheet for discovery, practice or review of the structures for expressing regret. There are 4 images of different men each with an upset face after some sort of regretful decision or situation. Some of the phrases very clearly match certain pictures, while others are a bit more open-ended. You can ask your students for justifications afterwards.

Then, you can have all students write their own sentence for each character. Then, take turns having students read their sentences out loud. The other students must guess who says what.

Once they feel comfortable with the structures, give them some time to come up with similar types of phrases or quotes for the upset women and girl in the bottom right. Think about using these responses to replay the game as a class with the three new images.

Here are the answers we have:

Picture 1

1. If only he had been more of a team player.
2. “I should’ve tried harder.”
3. “How could I have missed that?”
4. “We would’ve won if it hadn’t been for me.”

Pictures 2

1. He might still have his job if he had learned more English.
2. If only he had known, he wouldn’t have bought that new car.
3. “How could nobody have told me this was going to happen?”
4. He wishes he had behaved differently at the Christmas party.

Picture 3

1. He wishes he hadn’t booked such an early flight.
2. “I should’ve set three alarms.”
3. “If I hadn’t gone out so late last night, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”
4. “How could I have forgotten to set an alarm?”

Picture 4

1. He wishes he hadn’t invested his entire life savings in Beanie Babies.
2. “I could’ve made a fortune!”
3. If only he hadn’t been so greedy.
4. “This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t listened to Paul about Bitcoin.”