I’ve been teaching for more than ten years, and if ever there was a book that I could guarantee a student had used, if not actually owned, it was this. There are a couple of others in the series, the ‘Essential’ (elementary) and the Advanced, but this is the one that most people know.

I don’t like it, and never really have. I think that when it was first published (in 1985?), it must have been quite ground breaking, but I think over the years it has been overtaken by much better grammar books, and the revisions of the 1985 edition in 1994 and 2004 have been largely cosmetic. I think it looks a bit tired.

It’s not to say it’s not useful, or that students can’t learn from it, but that there are much better out there. I think it would be better to think of this as a reference book with some exercises, and not a book which students can use to practice, learn and develop.

And that’s the basic problem. The explanations are good, and the appendices useful, but there are not enough exercises and what there are are frequently unclear. What learners need is practice, and lots of it, a single page of practice at this level (at the very low end of intermediate to First Certificate level) is not enough.

The biggest crime, which fewer and fewer grammar books now commit, is to have numbered exercises in which each question is independent of the last, which means that there is no, or not enough, context for the student to work with. In the real world everything is in context, in many cases little could be understood without it. The most effective grammar practice is achieved with exercises in which each set of questions is based around a single situation, accompanied by an explanatory picture; this sets the scene and will help a student ‘feel’ they are there (Real English Grammar, for example, does this).

It has been five years since the last edition, perhaps a new, and improved, version is on the cards.

ISBN-10: 0521532892

ISBN-13: 978-0521532891

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