About
What is Grammaring.com?
Grammaring.com is a resource website on the grammar of Standard British English. It is intended for intermediate to advanced students of English as a second or foreign language who have already studied the basic grammar of English. It covers the most important areas of English grammar and concentrates on structures which may cause difficulty at an intermediate level or above.
How are the topics organised?
There are eleven main chapters, broken down to 380 subchapters and pages that each deal with a specific grammar point. The related explanations are accompanied by real-life sample sentences, and tables. If a similar point or the same point is discussed in a different part of the website, you will find cross-references to that point under the Related topics section on the given page. Where appropriate, chapters begin with guiding questions and end with revision questions. There is an Appendix that contains a list of the most common irregular verb forms and most important spelling rules. Finally, there is a Glossary that explains grammatical terms frequently used throughout the website.
How to use this website
The chapters are not arranged in order of difficulty, so this website can be used for quick reference on specific points of interest, as well as for systematic study, either as a self-study grammar resource or as additional material in an ESL/EFL course. No matter which way you use this website, it is recommended that you follow the cross-references, which will lead you to further information on a given item.
What is "grammaring"?
When I decided to create this website, I wanted to find a unique domain name that would make it different from the hundreds of other grammar sites. In a moment of inspiration, the word "grammaring" occurred to me. At that time, I thought it was a non-existent term: a play on the noun "grammar" used as a verb. I felt the -ing form would reflect the idea that grammar should not merely be considered as a field of study but rather as an activity in which language learners are dynamically engaged. Thus, in 2009, I launched Grammaring.com.
It was not until a few years later that, while browsing the internet, I learned that "grammaring" was actually an existing term coined by Diane Larsen-Freeman well before my discovery. In her Teaching Language from Grammar to Grammaring, she defines it as the fifth skill (besides reading, writing, speaking and listening), something more than just an area of knowledge: "the ability to use grammar structures accurately, meaningfully and appropriately".
Although I did not have this exact definition in mind when I chose the domain name for this site, I thought it was very close to my understanding of grammar and so I decided to keep the name.
Acknowledgements
I started writing the first version of the material presented here while I was teaching English grammar to English teacher trainees at the Juhász Gyula Teacher Training Faculty of the University of Szeged in Szeged, Hungary. I would like to thank all my students who have studied from this material since then for their useful feedback. I am also grateful to my colleagues for their help and encouragement.
Special thanks go to my colleague Tibor Borbás, who worked with me in the initial stage of the project and contributed greatly to the first version of the text.
Finally, I would also like to thank the proofreader Thomas A. Williams for his meticulous corrections and helpful advice.
Bibliography
I consulted the following sources in writing this material and recommend them for further study:
- Carter, Ronald and McCarthy, Michael. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
- Eastwood, John. Oxford Guide to English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Greenbaum, Sidney and Quirk, Randolph. A Student’s Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman, 1990.
- Swan, Michael. Practical English Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Thomson, A. J. and Martinet, A. V. A Practical English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
- Vince, Michael and Sunderland, Peter. Advanced Language Practice. Oxford: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2003.
For more information about the author and the proofreader as well as about the e-book The Grammaring Guide to English Grammar, click here.
Péter Simon
