Explaining English Grammar (Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers)

Rating:
Summary: Connects language functions to grammar
Review: This book is great. It does a lot to bridge the gap between teaching grammar and pragmatics (or language functions).

It goes beyond the decontextualized grammar that most grammar books provide and describes how the peculiarities and idiosyncracies of nine difficult areas of English grammar can be explained to students. The areas include articles, tense and aspect, modals, conditionals, prepositions and particles, indirect objects, infinitives and gerunds, relative clauses, and direct and indirect speech. The "Teaching Ideas" section at the end of each chapter connects grammar up with classroom activities, both the usual grammar worksheet type of activity and the interactive-communicative type.

It would have been nice if the book provided more ways to connect specific types of communicative activities with specific points of grammar, but I've been able to use this book to understand how the communicative activities I use regularly contain implicit grammar practice.

Jon Fernquest [e-mail] [e-mail]