I don't know about re-writing the grammar books, but - judging from your posting, Nik - maybe we should be re-writing the dictionaries.  "Loose"?  "descreet"? (Insert winky smiley)

Hi Nik,

I am from the generation of English learners who was heavily fed with grammar. The first thing I remember from my first English textbook was a table with personal pronouns I, you, he, she... (that was 21 years ago, when I was a 12 year old beginner in Slovenia). And from then on there were units with texts and vocabulary and more and more tables and rules and exceptions, year after year, book after book...culminating at university level, where grammar books ruled.

I don't think my grammar overdose served me too well. I see that whenever I am writing or talking in English I am breaking those rules and this makes me unsure of myself. I am happy to see a more moderate approach to grammar being adopted in language teaching in the recent years and also happy to see language is alive - sometimes following rules of its own. ;-)

Warmly,

Saša 

Hi Nik,

Yes definitely this seems like a good time to rewrite the grammar books for students. We've already had a couple of excellent attempts at rewriting grammar books for grammarians with the Collins Cobuild project in the nineties which produced a functional grammar book and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English in the noughties. Both of these were for the first time based on a corpus of texts rather than on teachers' intuitions. They showed what was most frequent and therefore worth concentrating on.

With all due respect :-) I'd suggest your examples illustrate the transient nature of informal language. They'll be out of date by the time you've thought up some materials to teach them. In fact students can acquire this kind of stuff fairly easily (irritiatingly easily compared to the difficulty they have acquiring other bits of grammar). But it's a lot harder for them to use it as native speakers do and why should they bother?

Olwyn

 Hello all

 on the point of stative words Nik is making here,  I recall a blunder I made with a dear friend of mine when he said:

"Are you wanting coffee or tea?" /Btw he is a native speaker from Scotland:)/

Since I ve been subjected to grammar overdose all these years, my brain set to a teaching mode just automatically replied "How come you can use WANT in continuous form! No, 'want' doesnt have a continuous form, the grammar book says. 

Oh, my surprise was huge when I heard a very similar structure on BBC 

That served me good and taught me a lesson. :( 

Natasha

Hello Robert

thanks for the reply. I have a few more examples for this thread on prescriptive grammar. 

I recall a teacher training I ve run in the region and the teachers were filling in the correct tenses in a long detective story. Then there came an example with "never" so almost 90% of teachers filled in the present perfect in it not even pausing to think. The latter "not pausing to think" bit was my only concern here

On my mentioning present simple as a right choice there, I only heard a resounding "No, never is "solely and only" used in present perfect".

I assume it was the string of never, ever, just, recently, lately ....blahblahblahblahblahblah of present perfect "prescription" on the plate  to blame in this case. What I liked about this was the hovering smile on the teachers's faces on providing an example "He never smokes". My point here is that I am positive they all are familiar with the structure /far too easy a sentence not to remember / but the way prescriptive grammar worked with them within a broader or longer context while doing it in a longer reading i.e. a detective story. They couldnt "detach themselves" from the deep-rooted use of never in present perfect. 

Natasha

Hi everybody,

  It seems to me many  grammar  text-books (which are in our region) are written in the

style of war communism . For example :the theme is An article." It states "The" is used

only here , "a" is used only there.

Then exercises are given without clear contexts and a student  should put the right article.

In some sentences a learner can put either A or THE because the context allows and 

it depends on a learner's state of soul at that moment  what article to put ,

but the answer is only"the" or only"A" without comments. Grammar is not a dogma,

grammar shows nuances of a soul, nuances of relations of a person 

and that is why function grammar  should be written .

Hi Lena,

We understood each other at once , because we were trained (I am

from Kazakhstan)by these books  and it was time we  taught our learners

by these books , which oriented only to memorize (as a parrot) without thinking. Now so

many text - books and sites are, but again to find books written  logically ,

successive, informative and  problem oriented with interactive activities is difficult.