Ur, Penny. “Grammar Practice Activities: A Practical Guide for Teachers.” Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

What kind of text is it?

• Modular units and activities organized by grammar category.
• Part of a series of activity- and theme-based handbooks for language teachers.
• CD with PDFs of exercise handouts.
• Exercises for elementary to advanced students, children to adults. Each exercise is discrete, not part of a larger lesson plan, so there’s no explicit recycling. However, some exercises include variations and suggestions for follow-up, which a teacher can use for review and recycling.

Approach to Grammar

• Introduction of target structure: deductive approach. Being an activity-based book, all the exercises involve student use of a target form stemming from auditory and/or visual stimuli.

• I found no exercises involving reasons or rules (prescriptive or descriptive). However, there are notes for the teacher in the form of language tips and teaching tips. They are descriptive in nature, illustrating possible problem areas or suggesting further avenues for exploration.

• Form, use and meaning are integrated, with an apparent emphasis on the first two. For example, the section about conditionals includes these exercises:

• Using “If ____, then ____” in the present tense, with a variation for the past tense (form-focused).

• Drawing on superstitions as source for production of conditionals. “If you walk under a ladder…” (use-focused).

• Using modals to justify actions (use-focused, and meaning implicit in specific context)

• Types of exercise: Wide variety, including visual, auditory and kinesthetic, conversational and written, production and cloze, etc.

• Four skills: Students read, write, listen and speak.

• Material is grammar-based, not topic-based.

• Focus on awareness or mastery of rules: I think the focus is on both. It’s up to the teacher whether to take the activities from the level of awareness to that of mastery.

• Metalanguage: Not required of the students. Procedures are written concisely enough that teachers should be able to communicate instructions clearly. Each exercise specifies a target proficiency level or range. A couple of the activities labeled “elementary” seemed too advanced for my elementary students.

• Comprehensiveness: Not comprehensive, but instead a sampling of introductory or reinforcement activities for a range of grammatical constructions.

• Charts, diagrams or other visuals: yes, all of them are included, depending on the exercise.

• Layout: Very user-friendly, with easy-to-parse table of contents and design convention (lots of white space) that makes it easy to flip through exercises and identify key aspects quickly.