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[curioustraveler]

In preparation for becoming an overseas English teacher, I�ve been reading a lot of grammar books to brush up on my skills. I�ve quickly learned that there are conflicts and discrepancies among grammarians. Some books, quite often in fact, use different terminologies to describe English rules.

I�ve also learned that American words and phrases � and sometimes even spellings � are also different from the U.K. (i.e. programme / program or enroll / enrol).

May I please have some recommendations for a very good grammar book that covers rules in depth? I have several �quick fix� handbooks that just aren�t very thorough. I don�t care if the book is big or expensive, I want something good. If anyone has suggestions on websites, I�ll take those too.

Also, how can one avoid looking stupid by using a spelling that might be misconstrued as incorrect?

Sincerely,
Concerned American

[Justin Trullinger]

Hi There-

Funny post title- EVERYONE around here seems to know a good grammar book.

I'd recommend "Practical English Usage" as a desk reference for the teacher. (Michael Swan)

"How English Works" also by Swan (and another guy) is a nice concise book, with short explanations and sample exercises you can use if you're wondering how to put gap-fills and whatnot together.

To truly understand grammar, I also recommend "the Three Dimensions: From Grammar to Grammaring" by Diane Larsen-Freeman. Don't try to read it fast- in fact, read it once now, and again after you've been teaching for a while.

If the Swan reference book doesn't float your boat, there's one by Somebody Murphy that I like as well, but have lent to a TESOL trainee and can't seem to remember the title. Or "the A to Z of English grammar." Also on loan.


Best,
justin

[johnslat]

Dear curioustraveler,
Despite the scorn of some, I still like the Azar series. I learned more grammar from it than from any other text, and all my students found it to be very helpful.

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0139528393

The Murphy's series is also extremely good:

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Use-Answers-ROM/dp/0521537622/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233878962&sr=8-1

Hope this helps.
Regards,
John

[naturegirl321]

Swan and Murphy are pretty good.

[MO39]

I'm partial to the Murphy books, both for teaching and reviewing the grammar for myself. It is available for both beginners (Basic Grammar in Use and for the next level of learners, Grammar in Use Intermediate. It comes in two "flavors", American and British English.

I recently purchased Michael Swan's Practical English Usage and have found it quite useful, though, before I bought it, I didn't realize that it deals with British English, not the American variety. It does include a brief section which highlights the most important differences between the two forms of the language.[/i]

[ouyang]

[natsume]

The grammar guru in my TESOL course, on grammar (UC Berkeley), pointed out that there is no one source, as there are these discrepencies, and strongly recommended we find a few that we liked and work with all of them. She gave us a classic (1964) I still use called Index to Modern English, by Thomas Lee Crowell. To be honest, I use this and look at a few internet sites when I need some clarification. (That said, I am a JET ALT, so I do not tend to teach much grammar, although I do some, and we are going to try to include more grammar in the team teaching classes this coming school year.)

As far as the spelling issue goes, I am not embarrassed to (occasionally) refer to a dictionary in class. Spelling was never a strong point, and with the advent of spell check, I haven't had to try for many, many years. I definitely don't think that the difficulties of English spelling, even occasionally for native speakers who are teaching the language, is something that should be hidden from people learning the language.

[natsume]

[jillford64]

[fluffyhamster]

An excellent and easily affordable grammar dictionary (quite formal, but equally, succinct if not clear; a book one will increasingly appreciate the more one uses it) is S.Chalker & E.Weiner's Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (i.e. buy this book anyway, in addition to whatever other ones you have got or still want to get, as it can start to come in handy and prove its worth): 'grammar as the total system of the language, embracing historical linguistics, phonetics, phonology, morphology, and much else...well defined and well illustrated with quotations from grammarians ancient and modern' (Times Literary Supplement); then, G.Kennedy's Structure and Meaning in English is a crash course in English and teaching it, from sound to discourse level.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wE5XyoCYpbsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=graeme+kennedy#PPP1,M1

Exercise books like Murphy do a good job of marshalling and presenting the main pattern(ing)s without imposing much terminology - fine for students who are more concerned with mastering the actual language than any metalanguage, and of obvious interest and value to teachers (especially those short of time but anxious to cover the practical essentials). More detailed but still digestible are those quick-reference usage guides like Swan (which is a cross between a grammar and a dictionary and lists points and pertinent examples that the likes of Murphy may not fully address). And what about Carter & McCarthy's Cambridge Grammar of English (innovative but therefore slightly jumbled content/appearance; good treatment of conversational spoken English and discourse generally, and comes complete with a handy CD-ROM version of the book which includes audio of every example), or John Eastwood's The Oxford Guide to English Grammar (a clear and relatively informal guide that is organized more like an actual grammar, and could therefore have been included below instead, before the COBUILD section). But all the above aren't quite courses in grammar though, and certainly not comprehensive grammars, so one's (=the teacher's) grasp of formal terminology (i.e. possible terminology for range of forms identified), and of the full range of possible functions for forms/forms for functions (there is often overlap!) will remain limited without at least consulting if not actually buying books such as the following:

M.Celce-Murcia & D.Larsen-Freeman's The Grammar Book 2nd Edition - more a course in pedagogical grammar, with some valuable information on how discourse factors affect functional choice of form, but can double as a reference grammar at a pinch. I sometimes find though that I want and need other analyses and more facts generally, especially when the authors spend too long on some formal/"analytical" possible irrelevancies and/or don't quite tie things together and follow through with enough useful activities (a fair number of their teaching suggestions aren't that good/realistic, which is strange considering how good and interesting some of the discourse-level discussion can be).

I'll just mention Michael Lewis's The English Verb at this point - a very interesting and potentially quite useful book on the analysis and teaching of this central part of the language.
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=62211

That, and Leech's Meaning and the English Verb (Third Edition).

OK, now for what most people would agree are some actual "grammars proper" (underlined) and related books (spin-offs; introductions/introductory (and some not-quite-so-introductory!) courses or concise "student" editions etc):

Collins COBUILD English Grammar - the first and central grammar publication to emerge from the COBUILD project (the original publication of which was the COBUILD Dictionary), very approachable and followed by a whole range of books including a more concise Student's Grammar with exercises, and culminating it seems in the very detailed and somewhat intimdating, but extremely useful (for syllabus-writing purposes) Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs, followed by Verbs: Patterns and Practice, and then Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives. [For those who might want more formality/formal functional detail than COBUILD's data-rich "lexicogrammar" provides, G.Lock's Functional English Grammar: An Introduction for Second Language Teachers is a pretty thorough and more ELT-oriented course in FG (and grammar generally i.e. which compares FG labels to more traditional ones), but one should compare that with Bloor & Bloor's The Functional Analysis of English (which is perhaps the more straightforward read-through of the two) before considering purchasing either. Also interesting is G.Thompson's Introducing Functional Grammar, but it's more selectively discursive and not quite as generally detailed overall, and therefore perhaps not a first choice. Finally, Downing & Locke's English Grammar: A University Course (2005) is as much a detailed functional grammar as it is a course].

Quirk et al's CGEL (C=Comprehensive, publ. 1985, based on earlier works) is for many still the best comprehensive grammar around (modern, functional, yet reasonably eclectic and not using too much new terminology), and there is a whole stable of smaller, complementary works published which use the same framework. Examples include (from smaller to larger): Leech's A Glossary of English Grammar, Leech et al's English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction (Second Edition), Biber et al's Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LSGSWE, with an accompanying Workbook edited by Conrad et al), and finally the full-size LGSWE (also edited by Biber et al), which isn't quite as comprehensive as the 1985 Quirk, but which is appreciably more empirical (being full as it is of all sorts of interesting statistics and facts) and thus 'complements rather than replaces the Quirk':
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J01/J01-1006.pdf
( http://icame.uib.no/ij24/reviews1.pdf )

Then of course there is the more recent Huddleston & Pullum's GCEL (C=Cambridge, publ. 2002), based on much "theoretical" linguistic research, which has drawn heaps of praise and for some supercedes the Quirk in the depth and quality of its analyses.

Unfortunately I left a cheap reprint (45 RMB or some incredible price like that!) of the Quirk in China, but I do own the H&P and have certainly been impressed by its depth (this size of grammar can and indeed does go into a lot of valuable functional detail too) in relation to the few topics so far that I've cared to look up in it. It would be irresponsible however to actually recommend such comprehensive (and clearly expensive!) tomes to relatively inexperienced teachers, because the obvious danger would be that even if they could find and make sense of the more useful information amidst all the sometimes overwhelming "inessential" details, there would not always be the time to do so (let alone to always translate that info into more teachable shape). Newer, less experienced teachers should therefore start with the Murphys or Swans, or better yet the COBUILDs or student or university or whatever editions of the LGSWE or Quirk stable respectively (the more empirical though, like the COBUILD or LSGSWE, the better I think, at least for EFL/ESL teachers - whatever you do, don't buy a grammar that appears to deal in too many strange/invented sentences!). NB: There is a Student's Introduction to English Grammar from H&P, but it isn't so much an abridgement of the full-size Cambridge GEL as a course in grammar, although obviously those terms that it does include are drawn from the parent work.
http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/
> http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/otherstuff.html (Note especially the 'Short Overview of English Syntax' available for free)

Anyway, here are a few links that compare the comprehensive grammars:

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1952.html (follow the sublinks back from this reviewer's response to > H&P's comments on a review, to > the original review itself)

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000122.html

http://www.uni-giessen.de/anglistik/LING/Staff/mukherjee/pdfs/Corpus%20Linguistics%20and%20English%20reference%20grammars.pdf

BTW, the titles in bold are the ones I really like and/or value most (implying, I for one find it hard to make do with and thus recommend any one single grammar book!).

One last thing, those who find books like even Eastwood's or the COBUILD Grammar (both have pretty clear definitions!) too "difficult", too much of a "detailed overload", could maybe go back and start with stuff like David Crystal's Rediscover Grammar and/or Making Sense of Grammar (latter is somewhat more detailed), or indeed the Leech et al mentioned above.

[father Mackenzie]

I use the A - Z of English Grammar and Usage by Leech, Cruickshank and Ivanic which is a Longman Title, English Grammar in Use Intermediate level by Raymond Murphy from Cambridge and the Longmans Contemporary English Dictionary (has a great CD rom) to help me.

Also I have The Practice of English Language Teaching by Jeremy Teaching to help techniques and refresh method.

[fluffyhamster]

Ooh yeah, dictionaries - they can be useful regarding grammar too! The leading advanced monolingual leaner dictionaries compared:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=65876

[Stephen Jones]

Larrsen-Freeman's a true monstrosity. A long list of unrelated usages.

Somebody once said that if Swan was the solution he'd stick with the problem. If Larssen-Freeman were the solution. you'd do better to stick to suicide.

[johnslat]

I think the problem here is that we all are recommending what works/worked for us - and perhaps we're not fully appreciating that not all learners learn in the same way that we do/did.
A text is/should be only a "take-off point"' from there on, let the students' needs/abilities/ direct you where you need to go.

[fluffyhamster]

I for one am just trying to give an indication of the range of books available, from "quick fixes" to "deskbreakers", because different teachers, even those becoming less averse to grammar than they might have once been, will still have different budgets and amounts of time available to research stuff.

I know that SJ now swears by the H&P CGEL, but used to get by with "just" the University Grammar of English (a concise Quirk & Greenbaum published around 1976 i.e. between Quirk's original 1972 Grammar of Contemporary English and the ComprehensiveGEL 1985 stonker that the team that he subsequently led wrote), but it would be interesting (for the benefit of those really time- and cash-strapped, "grammar-averse" newbs) to know if there are any books other than those two that he actually doesn't dislike with a vengeance.