Is it true that Azar, Murphy and Swann are the biggies?

bradwelljackson · Post by **bradwelljackson** » Wed May 12, 2010 9:08 am

When it comes to getting a good grammar book that helps an English teacher brush up on his grammar, I remember the days when Warriner's was the big name. Is it true that, nowadays, the big names are Azar, Murphy and Swann? That is to say, when English teachers start discussing grammar books, do they just say something like "The Murphy is the best"?
Do you know any names that are bigger?

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Wed May 12, 2010 11:21 am

Halliday but that is in my group of colleagues.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Wed May 12, 2010 12:39 pm

I hadn't heard of Warriner before so I had a quick look on Amazon and Google Books - seems he wrote for American high school students decades ago (as far back as the 1950s), so I'm not quite sure what relevance his stuff would have for (modern-day) TESL/TEFL, though I suspect W has a fair amount (or even too much!) of "style" guidelines and general prescription.

Murphy is OK for anyone in a rush to learn or "review" (=usually means exactly the same thing as 'learn'!) grammar, e.g. CELTA trainees, but it is plainly inadequate for developing a deep and principled (non-ad hoc) understanding; that being said, Swan isn't really enough either, despite it covering far more points (so even the bigger of these "Biggies" literally isn't big enough!); as for Azar, frankly I think her stuff is a bit of a joke (see threads over on the Job Discussion/International forums), but some people seem to prefer learning their grammar as "inventedly" (i.e. inauthentically, non-inventively), decontextualizedly and non-functionally as possible, even though that may make understanding (or at least, formally analyzing) authentic texts in the real world no less easy.

So I guess that anyone who wants to really understand grammar doesn't (doesn't have to) and ultimately probably shouldn't depend on any one book nowadays, and there are certainly plenty of empirically-informed, functional resources around at the moment (COBUILD, LGSWE, the Longman and now the Cambridge GEL, and then as Sally mentions, SF analyses, among which the Downing & Locke seems to be a SF "grammar proper", etc etc).

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri May 14, 2010 8:36 pm

Swan(n) and Murphy are the ones you often see about in the UK and places where Brits head off to. There are too many for people to easily discuss really, and not many people use a great number of them.

There ought to be a toptenapedia section to wikipedia for things like this.