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|title= English Grammar In Use

|author= Raymond Murphy

|genre=Reference

|summary= An invaluable EFL resource for intermediate students and their teachers, this have beautifully clear explanations and helpful exercises to illustrate just about every grammar point you'll ever need.

|date= April 2004

|isbn=978-0521532891

}}

I'll let you in on a little secret. It's a myth that all or even most EFL or ESL teachers love grammar. A lot of them don't even understand most of it when they first begin teaching. As someone said to me when I was starting out, ''The trick is to stay one exercise ahead of the students.'' Now decent lesson planning does take a bit more preparation than that, but I regularly ''learn'' grammar rules just a day or two before I teach them for the first time. The problem isn't that I don't know what you say in English, but that I don't know how to explain why it's correct in a simple way my students will understand. Enter Murphy.

I only have a few niggles with it. One is that it sometimes doesn't mention some of the widely-used structure names, e.g first conditional. I can look up ''conditionals'' and ''if statements'' in either the contents or index, but not the actual terminology ''first conditional'' or ''second conditional''. I could tell my students to revise these for homework, but if they were using this book they might not be able to find the relevant units to study. Additionally, the book has a British English focus, with only a couple of pages dedicated to the differences between American and British varieties. These pull together various points that perhaps would be more useful if they were included in the units to which they refer. It's not a problem as long as you know this section is at the back, but I imagine some students could miss it. Finally, some of the exercises do not require much thinking and are a bit repetitive, so as a teacher you pick and choose which ones to use and maybe don't take a whole page of exercises without chopping a bit.

{{amazontext|amazon=0521532892}}