My new PC has a nifty gadget, a program that checks not only your spelling but also the grammar of your sentences. Initially, I loved this feature but I'm now weary of its limitations. For one thing, it can't stand the passive voice and, without sparing your feelings, it automatically rewrites the entire sentence. This is great for writing business letters and minutes of meetings, but if you use it all the time, your correspondence sounds as canned as the laugh track in a bad sitcom. The speller/grammar checker also insists on calling your attention to every lower case letter after a period which means you can't do "e.g." and "etc.," the bane of the unsophisticated writer. Basically, it means that if you are like me and you didn't "get it" in Sister Dogmatica's 8th grade grammar class (o.k., so I made up her name because I can't remember it but she did exist), you are at the mercy of some computer programmer nerd and his "by the book" view of the wonderfully elastic (and sometimes bizarre) grammar of the English language.
Before I get into trouble with the grammarians reading this piece, I want to make my point clear, which is that if a teacher or anyone with a college education wants to veer off the standard language or merely push the "change" button in one's spell check, you still have to know the rules. If, like me, you had a teacher like Sister Dogmatica who thought diagramming sentences was innovative teaching, then you need a reference check-up book. I swear by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman's The Grammar Book for ESL and EFL teachers, but, alas, it doesn't distill the information enough for beginners. Nor is it handy enough for when you need a quick reference five minutes before that ESOL 1 class.
There are many grammar books published each year for the ESL market alone and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Given so many choices, it's hard for any to stand out from the bunch, but two new additions to our library, Safari Grammar and Safari Punctuation (published by Passport Books, a division of NTC/Contemporary), catch one's attention. I think it's a combination of the corny titles, cutesy but lovable cartoons, and their compact 9" x 6" size that reminds me of those cookbook series with titles like Loving your Crockpot and Quick Meals for One. But unlike most cookbooks, the Safari Grammar and Safari Punctuation books rely on cartoons to make the rules and facts of grammar simpler and easier to remember. The cartoons and accompanying words are large on the page for easy reading and the humor is corny enough for anyone to get it.
Each book has been written with the beginner student in mind, but teachers will appreciate some new ideas on how to explain the basics. The litmus test for me was on how Grammar explains the third person singular. The answer is that it doesn't really try for an explanation. Rather, it is simply illustrated with cartoons of a man, a woman and a parrot, each with dialogue balloons that read "blaw, blaw, blaw." "He talks/ She talks/The parrot talks," read the captions underneath. The next cartoon shows the man, woman and parrot talking, with--you guessed it-- "They talk" as a caption. Big arrows pointing to each illustration say, "Here third person singular" and "Not here third person singular." A sidebar reviews all of the pronouns, dividing them between those which need an "s" and those which don't. This minimalist approach, in my experience, is what works best for beginners who don't have an extensive grammar background in their own language. There are plenty of books for those ESL students who do want more grammar explanations and exercises. And of course, there is nothing like lots of classroom practice with real language to make a grammar point.
Like all grammar books I have ever used or read, this series manages to include something I have never heard about or, rather, that I never seen explained in this way (which exactly makes my point that grammar is not a static set of rules but is subject to different interpretations and changes). Take, for example, "imaginary" and "invisible" nouns. Do you know what they are? I'm taking an unscientific poll here so if you know, please e-mail me at mgonzale@gis.net or call me at the A.L.R.I.
On another note, the A.L.R.I. library now has an English/Haitian Creole version of the Basic Oxford Picture Dictionary. Finally, I thought, when I first saw it, but the copyright says 1995 so I guess we are about four years behind. It is especially useful for Kreyol Literacy classes, which, like most native language literacy instruction, suffer from a dearth of materials appropriate for adult learners. The Practical Guide for the Bilingual Classroom--Spanish/English is new as well in our library. Not as glossy or professionally printed as the Oxford Picture Dictionary, this is a useful tool for any teacher who wants to communicate in Spanish with her students or who uses a bilingual method of teaching ESL. Originally developed for the K-12 system in an unnamed community (probably somewhere in California, where it is published), it focuses on the vocabulary and phrases needed to communicate in different core areas, such as health, the classroom, and the community, among others.