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grammar book?

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 12:50 pm
by Mr Azik
Recently, i have found out that my weakest area of english is grammar, which affects to my writing and speaking so badly. Although i do my best to increase my score in those modules up to 7, it's not improving just because lack of grammar. Dear examiners and techers, from your own experience which grammar book would you recommend that is the most efficient and practical for Ielts.

Re: grammar book?

Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2015 4:31 pm
by Gelever
Hi!
My experience suggests that the best grammar book to score 7+ is English reading resources. You should read and analyse science reports (analyse from this perspective: sentence structure, terms used (phrasal verbs), prepositions used, punctuation, development of an idea, cohesive devises used, etc.), the Economist magazine, analytical reviews, etc. From there you can pick up exquisite sentense structures, rare collocations, high-rank narrowly-specialized concepts, etc., exactly what is required to score 7+ in writing, reading, perhaps speaking... Also: most of grammar mistakes (at the level 5.5-6.5) comes from spelling, again you do not need any books to check spelling, only a dictionary and a good memory and practise to use these complex words as much as possible, again and again. That's what I am doing to improve my English from 6.5 level.
In my opinion, traditional grammar: tenses, articles, complex sentences, parts of speech, stuff like that is comprehensively investigated in almost every serious grammar manual, like Cutting Edge, Cambridge Grammar, etc.

Best of luck!

Re: grammar book?

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2015 6:05 am
by Mr Azik
thank you Gelever for your essential suggestions, what score did you get from speaking and writing? I got 6 both of them, i think lack of grammar was the main factor for these scores.

Re: grammar book?

Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2015 9:34 pm
by Teacher
Dear Mr Azik
You can improve your grammar by reading and listening to English as much as you can, and by learning new words as 'chunks' of vocabulary. Try to learn phrases rather than just words so you use them the way an English-speaker does. For a book on grammar, try the Grammar in Use books by Raymond Murphy. They have a good explanation on the left hand page and exercises on the right.
Kind regards
Teacher Jill

Re: grammar book?

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 11:41 am
by Gelever
Just stumbled across this on-line resource:
http://www.grammarly.com/handbook/

I was able to find answers to the most of my questions related to grammar here) ;)