Real Grammar - Susan Conrad, Douglas Biber 2009

To the Teacher

Remember, Real Grammar focuses on typical grammar—the grammatical patterns that are most common in speech and writing. For teachers who have previously focused on correctness, this will be a new approach. But learners have to handle issues related to appropriateness, not just correctness, every time they speak and write. Most learners want to know how native speakers most typically choose to say or write something. Now that corpus research has shown us the typical choices, there is no reason to keep this information a secret!

The corpus findings, especially Frequency Information, may not be consistent with your intuition. Corpus research has shown that we often are not consciously aware of the most common language choices we make. Rest assured that the information in this book is based on principled analysis of a large, carefully designed corpus. For further details about the findings, you can consult the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English or the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (see Suggested Titles below).

All of the examples and all of the items in the activities are taken from the corpus so that students see grammatical structures as they were used by native speakers. At the same time, it is important for the language of the corpus extracts not to overwhelm students or to take their attention away from the structure that is being practiced. If it was necessary, we modified corpus extracts in limited ways to make them more accessible to students. We permitted only a small number of modifications:

• Difficult vocabulary was changed to easier vocabulary, using the same part of speech.

• Sentences that were extremely long and complex were simplified by deleting optional elements (e.g., optional adverbials).

• In discourse passages of academic writing, some intervening sentences were deleted while retaining the context and the target structures.

• In conversation, excessive fillers and false starts were reduced. A reasonable number were retained in order to maintain the “flavor” of conversation.

• In conversation, non-standard syntax that was likely to impede comprehension was standardized slightly, for example, by adding punctuation.