Grammar Plus is intended as a complete course in English grammar for students in the first two years of secondary school.
There are ten chapters, the first eight of which deal with individual word classes, phrases and clauses. Chapter 9 shows how these can be put together to form sentences and Chapter 10 shows how cohesive devices can be used to make sentences into paragraphs and texts. This arrangement leads the students step by step from grammar at word level, through grammar at sentence level, to grammar at text level.
Each chapter is divided into units dealing with different aspects of the main topic. For example, in Chapter 1 'Nouns' there are separate units for countable nouns, uncountable nouns, proper nouns, collective nouns, and so on. Each unit opens with a short passage showing how the item is used in context, in a section called 'What do they look like?' The following sections answer such questions as 'What are they?', 'How are they formed?' and 'How do you use them?' They contain simple, concise explanations, numbered for ease of use, with contextual examples that clearly illustrate the point being made. Complex issues (such as the changes involved in turning direct speech into indirect speech) are broken down into separate steps to make the information easier to assimilate.
Each unit ends with a 'Practice section containing a variety of exercises to test what has been learnt. These are graded for difficulty, usually ending with a cloze passage or a similar contextual exercise. In Chapters 1 to 9 there is also a 'Grammar for writing exercise, in which students are asked to produce a short passage of their own. The last nine units of Chapter 10 deal with the main text types: notes, procedures, explanations, information reports, factual recounts, personal recounts, expositions, narratives and poetry. Each of these units highlights the main grammatical features of the text type and contains a writing exercise.
This book is accompanied by an answer key to the exercises.