Practice Makes Perfect: English Verbs

This book is awful. It was apparently designed to be used by "students studying English for the first time," according to the back cover. Here are some short excerpts from inside the text:

"Wh-questions are used to elicit specific pieces of information."

"Use the present perfect when you want to refer to a situation that originated in the past but continues into the present or to refer to a past experience that has current relevance."

"When a one-syllable word or a word with a stressed final syllable ends in a single consonant sound, double the last letter before adding -ing."

"Modal auxiliary verbs are auxiliaries that signal such meanings as obligation and possibility."

I'm a native English speaker. But I don't even understand what the author is saying sometimes -- or it takes me a good long while to figure it out. Lots of native speakers don't know what "elicit" means. Why is the word in the book if a non-native speaker is almost definitely not going to understand it?

To me, it's common sense that a grammar book written for English learners should be WRITTEN FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS. This book, however, seems to be written for native speakers who are getting a degree in linguistics. The ironic part, however, is that the exercises are typical rote exercises -- conjugate yay verb in yay tense with this kind of sentence structure, for example. Anyone who can actually understand the book's explanations won't have any need to do the exercises, since that person is already very skilled in English. And anyone who actually needs to do the exercises probably won't understand what the book says.

I don't think this book should ever have been published.

Having said that, it is full of a variety of useful rote exercises. As the other reviewers have indicated, it could be useful as a supplement to another grammar text.

I've been using this book with a Nicaraguan woman I am tutoring in English. While it does not serve as a stand alone text, and the grammar explanations are difficult to follow for someone with only basic English skills, it does offer a lot of practice with most verb forms. It makes a helpful companion book. We've been using it with Ingles para Latinos, Level 2, which works out fairly well since Inglés para Latinos offers grammar explanations in Spanish, but it lacks a sufficient number of practice activites.

I recommend this product as an aide in teaching English as a Second Lanugage. Although there are plenty of websites dedicated to ESL, this little book has saved me a lot of time in putting together my one-on-one lessons. The exercises have really helped my student learn her verb tenses, and she has told me on more than one occasion that she really likes using the book during our classes.

Like a previous reviewer, I, too, have found English Verbs to be an inexpensive, helpful adjunct for preparatory college English classes. I purchased three of the them for ESL students who improved greatly in their English verb use after studying the text. I would recommend the quality paperback for any teacher who finds that certain students require additional assistance not provided by usual college prep textbooks.

This is a good, clear text for structuring lessons for foreign students. While it is not a huge treaty (nor is it meant to be), it is to the point, with lots of exercises. Especioally helpful are parts IV, V and VI, refering to imperatives, passive voice, hypothetical conditional, phrasal verbs, modals, and gerund and infinitive complements. These last are subjects I have found difficult to find in other texts, at least with an easy presentation that can be understood by students of English as a second language. I have recommended this book to students in Chile.