Big Grammar Book 2
Why another Big Grammar Book? Wasn’t the first one big enough? Well, it’s eleven years since I wrote the first book and it has been, without a doubt, the most popular of all my English Banana books. It’s always the first book that people ask me about; it’s always cited as the most useful and valuable of my books; indeed it has been downloaded for free hundreds of thousands of times! No matter how much I love and promote my other children (I mean, books!) Big Grammar Book is what people want. So, I often used to joke about making a sequel: give the people what they want. This summer I thought: why not?
The Big Grammar Book 2 is packed with 101 printable worksheets for teaching and improving grammar skills in English. The topics are wide and varied, starting with Essential English worksheets that cover the basics, like the alphabet, days, months, and telling the time; then tenses (a lot about tenses!), then irregular verbs, question forms, word order in sentences, parts of English, uncountable nouns, and so on! If you have used the first Big Grammar Book, you will know what to expect from this one. Around 25% of the worksheets in this book are closely modelled on activities in Big Grammar Book 1, for example Full Stops 1 & 2 (pp.68-69).
The material starts off at beginner level, with the alphabet worksheets, then gets progressively more difficult, while staying in Elementary (A1 / A2) level. Only towards the end do things get “tougher”, with articles, conditionals, and phrasal verbs making their inevitable appearance! Don’t worry – all the answers and notes for use are included at the back of this book.
English teachers can use big grammar book 2 in class, although it may be better to use the worksheets for homework and let students focus on speaking and listening and group work – producing language – in class. It is ideal for private study – i.e. homework or self-study – and also for use in online lessons. Teachers can adapt the worksheets in this book, and I would positively encourage them to treat many of the pages as templates for producing their own activities. For example, the sentence building worksheets (from p.60) would be ideal for adaptation, among many others.
