The Oxford English Grammar Course by Michael Swan and Catherine Walter - Author Review

Michael Swan, UK

Michael Swan is a writer specialising in English Language teaching and reference materials. He has had extensive teaching experience with adult learners, and has worked with teachers in many countries. E-mail: swanmic@gmail.com

Published by Oxford University Press
Basic and Intermediate Levels with or without Answer Key
Advanced level with Answer Key

What is the Oxford English Grammar Course?

The Oxford English Grammar Course (OEGC) is a three-level series of grammar practice books, designed both for home study and class work. The Course grew out of two earlier separate prize-winning books: The Good Grammar Book and How English Works. Although these books were both successful and popular, we felt that they could be usefully revised and expanded, and turned into a linked sequence. While working on this, we took the opportunity to extend the sequence by adding an advanced-level book, for which there was a considerable need. (The advanced-level book recently received the Society of Authors / British Council award for ELT writing.) Each of the three books can be used either for systematic grammar study or for supplementary work on particular points which cause difficulty.

Effectiveness and interest

Our aim is not to encourage students and teachers to do more grammar – they have other important claims on their time. OEGC is intended to teach the grammar that students really need as effectively and economically as possible, in or out of class, thus freeing up time for other activities. One way of making grammar work effective is to make it colourful, literally and metaphorically, by providing attractive materials and engaging activities – grammar doesn't have to be grey!

Output is most important

The three 'exes' in grammar work (explanations, examples and exercises) are by no means equal in importance. Students learn mostly from what they do themselves, which means that the third 'ex' is more important than the other two put together. We feel strongly, therefore, that the bulk of grammar-teaching time, and most of the space in a grammar practice book, should be devoted to student output. Many other grammar practice books have a 50-50 input-output ratio, filling the left hand page of each spread with explanations and examples, leaving only half of the space – the right-hand pages – for exercises. While there are certainly good books which use this formula, we think the ratio is far from cost-effective. Our target, especially at the two lower levels, is something more like 25-75, so as to provide maximum practice.

The explanation: a bridge

Explanations must of course be adequate, but we like them to be clear and reasonably simple, so that students can assimilate them and put them into practice. Teachers are sometimes uneasy about giving simple explanations – they feel they should tell the whole truth about a point. But when in life does one tell the whole truth? Certainly not in the language class – we are teachers, not descriptive grammarians. Our job is to build a solid and memorable bridge from A (what the student knows now) to B (what the student can reasonably be expected to know next). If the bridge is too long it will collapse, and the student will learn little or nothing. Further information can come later, when the student is ready for it.

Explanations are best given in the students' mother tongue. This is obviously not feasible in a book written for learners worldwide, though we hope in due course to produce bilingual versions for as many countries as possible. But if the teacher can translate or supplement our economical explanations, this helps students enormously. (There is an old language-teaching superstition that the mother tongue should be avoided at all costs. There is no theoretical or research justification for this, and as far as grammar explanation is concerned, it defies common sense.)

Examples

Examples need to be simple and realistic, written or chosen so as to show clearly how a grammatical element is constructed and used. Sentence-level examples are often ideal, especially if they are memorable – we often use striking or humorous quotations, advertisements, public notices and cartoon captions. We also give longer examples, such as suitably chosen short texts, when they are useful in showing how certain structures (for example tenses) are used. But examples don't have to be authentic; in fact, raw corpus examples are sometimes seriously unsatisfactory – mysterious out of context, and cluttered with nuisance vocabulary that you have to waste time explaining.

Discovering rules

Inductive work, where students discover the rules for themselves by studying examples, can be very motivating and effective. However, it needs to be carefully managed. We include exercises of this kind for selected points, making sure that students are given enough support to find their way to the correct explanations without too much difficulty.

Exercises

With complex grammatical points, it is often helpful to start out by giving students a relatively traditional exercise such as a gap-fill, which will enable them to concentrate mainly on the details of the structure concerned. But of course, the more we can bring in personalisation and real communication the better. We like to practise grammar by giving students things to think about and problems to solve; by offering them opportunities to express personal reactions and opinions or to talk about their experience; by providing channels for their humour and creativity; by telling them interesting things they don’t know.

Grammar and …

Where possible, it's good to combine grammar with work on other aspects of language. We revise and teach vocabulary along with grammar. We link grammar with skills work in various ways. And we are interested in the relation between grammar and pronunciation, particularly listening comprehension. For many learners, difficulty in perceiving unstressed grammatical elements (word-endings, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, articles etc.) can seriously affect their understanding of natural speech. The 'Pronunciation for grammar' CD-ROMs in each book contain work on these points, along with exercises on stress and intonation, linked to each of the grammatical topics that we deal with.

OEGC Advanced contains a special section on 'grammar beyond the sentence', in which we look at the grammatical areas which can affect students' production and comprehension of spoken and written texts at different levels of formality.

Online support

A substantial programme of online support for users of OEGC is currently in development. Some additional tests and supplementary exercises are already available, along with lesson-by-lesson notes for teachers.

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.