Job Discussion Forums

[Mrguay84]

Hi all. As with a lot of native speaking would-be or newbie English teachers, I've discovered that my knowledge of English Grammar (technical terms, terminology etc.) isn't brilliant, as I never learnt it at school (just how to talk, near perfectly)
So I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good listening source - CD or MP3 download whereby I can learn (or in some cases re-learn) English Grammar. I'm really busy at the moment so can't spend all my time in books, but as I spend a lot of time on the move I was thinking that 'learning on the go' might help out bit. Thanks a lot.

[fluffyhamster]

To me, it's a clear toss-up between Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, read by the author himself in his soft, gentle American tones, and available on 3 CDs, or Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, read by Eric Bana sounding more like his Aussie self and on 8 CDs.

But seriously, I've never heard of a grammar book (versus foreign language course) being available in audio format - it just doesn't strike me as being a financially viable proposition for any publisher, and I myself am a bit sceptical about how much one could ultimately learn from such an approach anyway. But I suppose there might be the odd lecture or two somewhere, or something that was made for blind people or whatever!

Ultimately though you'd probably have more luck just getting something like the Dummies guide, which shouldn't be too heavy going to read and therefore not take too long to finish. Or you might like to try David Crystal's Rediscover Grammar and Making Sense of Grammar (latter IIRC seemed somewhat more in-depth than former), or the Chambers Desktop Guides: Effective Grammar for a slightly systemic-functional-grammar -influenced approach (one of the editors/writers was Gill Francis, who's quite famous for her work on several COBUILD publications).