Grammar and Usage in the Classroom

The purpose of this book is to give prospective teachers a strong grasp of English grammar so that they in turn can teach it to their students. The intended audience is primarily native English-speaking teachers and native English-speaking students, although it is also addressed to the ESL students who appear in main stream classes. This book has some unusual and useful tools in it, including old-style Reed-Kellogg sentence diagramming exercises and sentence combining. I don't know of anyone who likes diagramming sentences; it's painful and tedious. However, diagramming makes teachers and students alike think of language as an abstraction, and it is possibly one of the best tools to compel them to focus on and analyze its parts. The text is divided into two sections--Grammar and Usage, and what I like most about the book is the many usage tests. These are tests given that draw upon a native speaker's innate sense of grammar rules to determine which part of speech a word, phrase, or clause may be acting as. They're learned quickly and easily, so they're very practical. These usage tests have revolutionized how I approach analyzing sentence structure, and they've been invaluable aids in classroom teaching and analyzing pieces of student writing, no matter how elaborate or chaotic they may be. The tools in the book are very adaptable, so one can work with students at whatever level he or she finds them--already proficient or blissfully unaware. I also like that there are many, many hands-on exercises for the reader to practice the concepts, and there are chapter reviews to ensure the concepts are grasped. Also, there is a very handy Glossary of Grammar Terms that explains the concepts at a glance. The book gives the reader practical tools he or she will need to understand and teach grammar without getting bogged down in Linguistics jargon. I found the diagrams used to teach the concept of verb tense to be very helpful. Additionally, Lester wrote this book with a lot of humor, and it comes through in the text and practice exercises, which helps with such a dry subject. The book has many interesting facts. For example, I found it fascinating that English, originally a Germanic language, was taught with Latinate terminology that inaccurately described the tenses, and that is why what we today call the Perfect Tense isn't really perfect and why the Present Tense isn't used to discuss what is happening in the present. The many merits of the book being duly noted, what I don't like about the book is how errors pervade the entire text, whether they are mere typographical errors or flat out wrong answers to the exercises. It doesn't take much of an imagination to see how confusing these mistakes can be to someone struggling to learn English grammar. I wish the publishers would release another printing that is properly proofread because I hate to see correctable mistakes mar an otherwise good book. The book accomplishes what its author intended: