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The 145 units in the book (and related appendices and extra exercises) make it a fairly comprehensive look at English grammar. Though it is advertised as a book for intermediate learners, I usually recommend it even to upper-intermediate and advanced students. A new fifth edition was published this year, and I will continue recommend it to students.
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There are quite a few good grammar books available to students and teachers nowadays, but English Grammar in Use is still my favorite. It will definitely be a book that I keep on hand when I need for information to explain a concept to my students. There were lots of things that I was able to take away from this book and actually start using in my classroom right away. I feel this is a much better form of practice (with a certain answer that can be found in the answer key) since it forces the student to learn to place the grammar pattern onto an appropriate situation. There were a few activities that had the students describing a picture of situation with the correct grammar. I think that this would especially helpful to Korean students since the wide variety of prepositions is not found in their language, and the average Korean learning English is prone to overlook the word when producing a sentence.Ī lot of the practice problems were focus on accuracy with most of the activities being finishing the sentence with the correct pattern discussed on the previous page. They were lots of pages with lists of common preposition patterns and explanations to the meaning of these phrases. I really like the explanation of 'adjectives + prepositions' and 'verbs + prepositions' at the end. Even the conditionals sections had some explanations of different aspects that could help clarify or reinforce the grammar point to students who already have a fairly solid understanding of conditionals. Also, a few items (especially conditionals) were not explained in away that would be intuitive to someone learning this for the first time.ĭespite these flaws, the book did have a lot of explanations that could help people understand some of the finer points of different grammar patterns.
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The order of the grammar points presented were not what I would consider the most ideal order.
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