Practice Makes Perfect: English Grammar for ESL Learners (Practice Makes Perfect Series)

I know this will be a good book to add to my collection. I am a newly retired teacher and have volunteered at a local literacy council to teach ESL. Thanks!!
cayres

I purchased this book for my ESL learners. I have not used it yet.

It said "the book was used but like new". It took about 5 weeks for me to receive the book and it was in a very bad shape, very dirty with stains. The book was badly taped and glued together and writen all over. All the questions in it were answered and erased but you still could see it.
The owner is not ohonest about his book. I'm very dispointed about this person that who would lie about such a small sale. I would not deal with this one again.

English grammar is tough even for native speakers. If a person is doing it himself,this is one of the best ways to work through the info necessary to reach a working level. By that I mean communicating and understanding what comes back at you. The reason adults have a harder time picking up a language is that they (the adults) are afraid of being embarrassed. Children are fearless. This book, if worked through to the end, will install confidence, and that is 90% of the game.

If you have/are a student who needs focused practice with the basics of English grammar, this book is a good choice. It doesn't really focus on usage, context, etc. That's fine, though--its purpose is practice and review. It's particularly useful for beginner/false beginner students who never learned or have forgotten basic grammar terms (transitive verb, etc.). Of course,these terms and rules should NOT be the focus of any modern ESL/EFL course. (Why? Because that's not how people actually learn to use language.) Nonetheless, the rules and terms are useful for discussing grammar problems, explaining the differences between a student's home languages and English, etc. Get this book as a supplement for a comprehensive, communicative textbook such as _Interchange_ or _Out and About_.

In terms of design and planning, it has lots of white space and a good balance of questions and explanations. Most other grammar-focused books use explanations that are too wordy and hard to understand, and present text-filled pages that are overwhelming to beginners.

As an example, I have a client who is an adult from Japan. He studied English for a year or two in junior high and at a conversation school. Because he had a fair amount of vocabulary and could handle basic conversations ("How are you?" etc.), we started off using an Interchange book. However, I eventually realized that he didn't know terms such as "adjective," which sometimes made it hard for me to explain why a sentence he had written needed to be changed. I picked up this book, and he's really appreciated adding some focused grammar work to our otherwise functional/conversational sessions. We've been following up the grammar work with Mad Libs so that things don't get too boring. He loves the book and uses its nice amount of questions in each section as self-guided homework.

As a bonus, this book is quite inexpensive and thus good for private teaching situations or for self-study.