Review of 'Functional Grammar in the ESL Classroom: Noticing, Exploring and Practising' Rodney H. Jones and Graham Lock

Abstract

For teachers of English as a second or foreign language, especially those who have been applying text-based approaches to language education for some time, a first reaction to 'Functional Grammar in the ESL Classroom: Noticing, Exploring and Practising' by Rodney Jones and Graham Lock might be to ask why it has taken so long for a book such as this to appear. It is certainly a welcome addition to the field because of the way that it integrates, in ready-to-implement lesson plans, established ESL teaching practices with text-based and functional understandings about the way language is used and learned. Jones and Lock provide teachers with a framework for relating, in a principled way, teaching and learning about language as text in context with a repertoire of activities for teaching students about the grammatical structures of English, a repertoire that reorients communicative language teaching (CLT) activities familiar to ESL teachers (Brown 2007: 45-52) so they can be included more effectively in a text-based program.