Betty Azar English Grammar First Edition

Using Betty Azar English Grammar First Edition in a Real Classroom

I ran into an issue with the first edition back in 2008 when teaching a group of Japanese adult learners. The textbook uses the term "present perfect" and explains it primarily as an experience-based tense, which works fine for sentences like "I have been to Paris." But when my students started saying things like "I have worked here since 2019," they kept dropping "since" and saying "I have worked here three years" instead. The book never really addresses that specific confusion in its exercises. So I had to supplement with my own worksheet that forced the since/for distinction through repetition drills. The original text is still solid for the core explanations, but if your students are mixing up duration and indefinite experience, you will need to create additional practice material. The

Betty Azar English Grammar First Edition

was originally published in 1987 and it shows. The layout is dense compared to modern grammar books. Each unit opens with a reading passage, then breaks down the target grammar point with a table that can look intimidating on first glance. It is not designed to be skimmed. You read through the passage, look at the table, do the exercises, and move on. That is the intended flow and it actually works if you stick to it. What most people miss about the first edition is the way the exercise sets are sequenced. The control exercises come first with fill-in-the-blank items where the answer is essentially given by context. Then the production exercises ask you to write your own sentences. The bridge between those two stages is where learners usually get stuck, and the book does not always make that transition smooth. I found that having students read their filled blanks out loud before moving to the open production section cut my correction time roughly in half. It forces them to hear the structure before they try to generate it themselves.

The vocabulary level in the first edition is noticeably lower than later editions. Some of the example sentences feel dated or overly simple. "The book is on the table" is repeated many times across different grammar explanations. This was likely intentional for the original audience of ESL beginners, but it can feel condescending to older teen or adult learners. A workaround I used was to replace the textbook examples with context-appropriate ones during class. Instead of talking about whether the cat is under the chair, my adult business students talked about meeting schedules and project deadlines using the same grammatical structures. One counter-intuitive thing about using this book is that the answer key is not organized by unit number in a straightforward way. In the first edition, the answers appear at the back of the teacher's edition but the student workbook answers are sometimes scattered or incomplete. If you are self-studying without the teacher's guide, you will hit dead ends on about twenty percent of the exercises where the key simply does not list a correct answer. I spent maybe two weeks trying to verify my responses to Unit 14 before realizing the book itself had a typo in one of the exercises. The official errata from the publisher lists about eleven known errors across the first edition. Another thing nobody talks about is how the first edition handles the present perfect continuous versus the present perfect simple. Later editions expanded this significantly. The first edition gives you maybe three pages total on the distinction, and the examples lean heavily toward stative verb confusion. If your goal is a thorough treatment of that particular topic, you should pair the book with something like Thomson and Martinet's A Practical Grammar of English for the supplementary explanation. Azar covers the basics adequately, but she does not dig into the aspectual nuances that advanced learners eventually need.

Downloading a copy of this book is straightforward in theory. The first edition is out of print, so you will not find it on the publisher's website. The legitimate routes are purchasing a used copy through Amazon, AbeBooks, or eBay. Legal PDF versions are not officially distributed. Any site offering a full scan is almost certainly hosting pirated material. I learned this the hard way in 2011 when a link I found on a forum turned out to be a corrupted file that was missing roughly forty pages from the middle sections. The physical copy for around fifteen to twenty-five dollars depending on condition is the only reliable option at this point. One bottleneck with the first edition is the audio material. There is no accompanying audio CD in the original release. Later editions added CDs and online audio, but if you are working with the pure first edition, there is no recorded listening component. This matters more than it should for pronunciation and intonation practice tied to grammar patterns. I ended up recording myself reading the dialogue passages from each unit and playing them back to students. It was tedious but it filled the gap adequately for most purposes. The structure of the book assumes a certain pedagogical approach that some teachers find rigid. Each unit follows the same pattern: presentation, controlled practice, then freer practice. It is effective for consistent curriculum planning but it leaves little room for adjusting the pacing based on class needs. If your students already understand a concept, pushing through the full unit anyway wastes time. If they struggle, the built-in exercises may not provide enough repetition. I typically skip the initial presentation section for units I know the class has already encountered and go straight to the practice exercises, then fill in gaps from there.

For self-learners, the biggest limitation is the lack of explicit error feedback in the student edition. The first edition does not include detailed explanations for why a particular answer is wrong in the exercise section. You get the correct answer in the back, but not the reasoning. This means you need either a teacher to review your work or a companion resource like Understanding and Using English Grammar by Azar herself in a later edition, which has more extensive answer explanations. If you are deciding whether to invest time in this edition specifically, the main trade-off is cost versus currency. The first edition covers the same core grammar topics as later editions at a fraction of the price if you buy used. But the examples are outdated, the audio is missing, and the answer key has known issues. For a classroom setting with a teacher who can adapt the material, it remains functional. For a self-study learner without access to correction, a later edition or a different grammar resource may serve you better. The book works best when treated as a structural framework rather than a complete learning system. Pair it with supplementary materials for listening practice, create your own updated examples for the dated vocabulary, and verify answers against the teacher's edition or publisher errata when possible. That approach turns a sixty-dollar problem into a workable one.