Practical English Usage - pdf [a0b10c110]

Practical English Usage 3rd Edition





Product Details



Language: English

ISBN-10: 0194420981

ISBN-13: 978-0194420983



This unique reference guide addresses problem points in the language as encountered by learners and their teachers. It gives information and advice that is practical, clear, reliable, and easy to find. Most of the book is about grammar, but it also covers selected points of vocabulary, idioms, style, pronunciation, and spelling.



About the Author

Michael Swan is a writer specializing in English language teaching and reference materials. His interests include pedagogic grammar, mother-tongue influence in second language acquisition, and the relationship between applied linguistic theory and classroom language-teaching practice, and he has published a number of articles on these topics.



Reviews

As I was preparing to take the TEFL course to teach abroad and inquiring about the different books that the school was suggesting, I was told simply by my son who is also a teacher and the statement was confirmed by both my instructors, "just buy Swan, it's the bible and it's all you need". Practical English Usage is just that. For whatever reason Michael Swan decided to write this book, we are forever grateful.



I'm a native English teacher in a non-English speaking country and Practical English Usage has quickly become my go-to resource for researching grammatical issues. Browsing this easy-to-read grammar guide has also helped to inspire new topics for my ESL lessons. Written in plain English without extensive grammatical jargon, the book is an easy read and the organization makes it simple to browse any given topic. Specific words and phrases are indexed separately, so the reader can research a broad topic like adverb particles or find a specific phrase like "find out" in the index and read about it in an article on the word "know". I imagine Practical English Usage would also be extremely useful to an advanced student of English as a foreign or second language, though the organization and diversity of topics might overwhelm intermediate students.



As a guide to practical usage rather than rules of grammar, incorrect usages that have fallen into common use are typically described as "informal" rather than "incorrect"; likewise, the grammatically correct form is typically described as "formal" or "very formal English". This may annoy militant grammarians but should please writers and teachers less inclined to attack split infinitives or sentences ending with prepositions. (Those who wish to wage war over these usages will find ample rules of engagement, however.) Practical English Usage also includes practical topics such as the truncated grammar of newspaper headlines, the standard form of a business letter and even a brief mention of mobile texting conventions.



My two minor complaints: first, the avoidance of grammar jargon in the organization of the book can take some time to adapt to. For example, you won't find "transitive verb" or "intransitive verb" in the index, but you'll find those subjects in the "verb complementation" segment and related articles. Second, as a publication of Oxford University, the book sometimes feels a need to devote rather copious explanations to sentence structures and usages that are uncommon outside of British English. The book does an excellent job of noting distinctively British and American usages; readers may even be surprised to learn which phrases they use in everyday English are peculiar to their linguistic lineage. For an American reader such as myself, however, some of the structures discussed at great length seem fairly irrelevant outside of the dominion of the British crown. Nevertheless, this book is an invaluable resource for practical English and recommended to educators, learners and writers of all types.



I used an earlier edition of this book in China about fourteen years ago to learn English. Practical English Usage is written in such simple English that I was able to read and benefit from it with merely a lower-intermediate grasp of the language then. I found it encouraging as a language learner to be able to read and study the English language in English, parting with my native language for the first time. I remember that I was always able to find corresponding entries to words that I found difficult to differentiate. In short, I consider this book indispensable to learners of the English language.



The volume I used fifteen years has since followed me to Singapore and eventually to the United States. Although I, having developed proficiency in the language, no longer use the book, I still hold much respect for it. I have used quite a lot of ESL books and Swan's work easily falls into my top-three list.