You will never need to study grammar again, provided you are willing to grind through all twenty chapters and six hundred pages of this one book.
Anyone who has been through school knows that the textbook rarely teaches you as well as the teacher's own handouts do. This book is precisely that, turned into a book.
The question that started it
It began with a question from a student at the University of Iowa, put to Betty Azar in 1965. She had never taught English to non-native speakers when her boss handed her that class, and she took it mainly to avoid offending him.
She could not answer the question. She had been born and raised in the US and had barely thought about grammar in her life. So she went home, read through some references, and worked out the answer. That is how she came to teach TESOL.
Being a genuinely conscientious teacher working outside her specialism, she started researching and writing extensive handouts for her students. Word spread. A publisher eventually approached her about turning those handouts into a grammar book. It became a landmark in English language teaching, and it has held its value for more than forty years.
The title is Understanding and Using English Grammar, and it comes as a main text, a workbook and a teacher's book.
Why I keep recommending it
The explanations are vivid and clear. To teach tenses, Azar uses timelines showing past, present and future, which is the foundational approach Cambridge uses for teaching tenses. Every grammar point is explained in language a non-specialist can follow, with a definition, examples, and a breakdown of those examples.
The exercises are properly linked. Learners get stuck and frustrated when they get something wrong and cannot see why, or worse, have no answer key at all. This book has detailed answers with explanations, and every exercise is annotated with the grammar section it draws on. If an exercise points to chart 20-1, reading chart 20-1 carefully will get you through every question in it.
It is highly practical. The examples are realistic, with only about twenty percent of the attention on structure and the other eighty percent on context and appropriate use. The point of studying grammar is to build your own sentences when you need them. Nobody in real life asks you to fill in a blank.
But it is not for everyone
If you are learning English to use it, for ordinary conversation, or even for IELTS, you do not have to work through this. It takes a serious amount of time.
The book suits:
- English teachers who want to understand grammar well enough to explain it.
- People who are genuinely fascinated by the language.
If you have spent years never quite grasping the twelve tenses, the passive and the rest of it, one pass through this will settle it.