MED Magazine – Internet Grammar of English

MED Magazine - Issue 59 - October 2010

MED Web Watch
by Mairi MacDonald

Next in a series of short articles looking at web resources useful for teachers and learners of English. As a rough guide, each site is marked out of 25 in terms of content, design and ease-of-use.

Internet Grammar of English
www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/home.htm

This site, as the title suggests, is all about grammar, and deals with the subject in great detail. Aimed at university students, it will no doubt also be of use to teachers seeking to guide learners through the joys of English grammar, or wishing to brush up on some of the more advanced aspects of the language themselves.

Ignore the warning on the home page that the site is only available to ‘all other users’ (i.e. those who aren't studying at a UK university) for a limited time; the content is now free to everyone.

Internet Grammar of English is essentially a reference book, written by the Survey of English Usage, based at University College London. It reads like a traditional academic book on grammar, but unlike a paper reference book, the information is organised in a web-friendly way, so you can dive straight into the interactive exercises if you wish, use the search engine, or simply browse around, from the Contents page or Index. There is also a glossary, but on my browser it appears in a tiny section in the corner of the web page, with vertical and horizontal scrolling, making it almost impossible to follow.

At 12 years old, the site does feel a little dated. It uses frames which mean that new pages appear within the main page. It's possible to lose your way, but clicking on Home will steer you back to the beginning. Javascript is necessary for the exercises, so you might have to coax your browser into performing some of the activities (i.e. enable JavaScript).

That said, the site has much to commend it and considering the amount of information and interactivity on offer, the Internet Grammar of English puts sleeker, more modern sites to shame. To get the most from the site, use the Index to find the area you're interested in. Helpfully, topics which are accompanied by an interactive exercise are flagged up. Alternatively, the List of Exercises will take you straight to the interactive content.

Bear in mind that this site is aimed at native-speaker undergraduates; the explanations are detailed and will be tricky for English learners to follow without some direction. They could be scared off by the technical tone in which some of the topics are presented, and might even be scared off by the feedback at times. The way the exercises are marked varies – sometimes you compare your answer with the correct one, other times it's marked with a tick or a cross. However, after casually attempting the exercise on ‘the gradability of adjectives’, I was greeted with ‘NO THAT'S WRONG! THIS BOX SHOULD NOT BE CHECKED!’

The strength of the site lies in the ease with which you can navigate to the exact topic you need. It's easy for teachers to cherrypick those aspects relevant to classwork, or find out more about a particular topic before introducing it in class.

Score
current and archived content
up-to-dateness/topicality
graphic design and navigation
speed and technical performance
features and functionality
overall score	16 out of 25