37.2061, Reviews: Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials: Graham Burton (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2061. Fri Jun 12 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2061, Reviews: Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials: Graham Burton (2026)

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Date: 12-Jun-2026
From: Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig [eccraig at uga.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Graham Burton (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-218

Title: Grammar in ELT and ELT Materials
Subtitle: Evaluating its History and Current Practice
Series Title: Second Language Acquisition
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Multilingual Matters
           http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Book URL:
https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781836682561

Author(s): Graham Burton

Reviewer: Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig

SUMMARY
The author begins by discussing the rationale for the book and by
making a clear distinction between the functions of consensus and
canon in determining the grammar syllabus for English language
teaching throughout its historical development. Through interviews
with professionals in both academia and publishing and with extensive
descriptions of popular coursebooks from the field, Burton outlines
the guiding principles and changes in the discipline over the years.
The text is divided into eight chapters including an introduction; a
discussion of pedagogical grammar in general, including the nature of
the ELT publishing industry; the evolution of the canon and consensus
on grammar teaching from the early 20th century to present day; two
chapters of interviews regarding the canon with ex-teachers/teacher
trainers, authors, editors, and other professionals from Longman,
Oxford, and Cambridge publishers; two chapters focusing on the
contemporary canon in coursebooks with regard to conditionals,
relative clauses, and future forms; and a conclusion that reviews the
development and justification for the ELT canon today. An extensive
list of references and a brief index are also included.
Chapter 2 explains how pedagogical grammars differ from grammars in
general, such as in  considerations of teaching content, learner
competence, and sequencing, more recently incorporating findings from
learner corpus research. The author contends that pedagogical grammar
“combines aspects of both descriptive and prescriptive grammar” as far
as determining what to teach and when to teach it. He explains that
pedagogical grammars are necessarily selective in focusing on the
context of various learners’ needs/wants as dictated by their
reason(s) for learning and first language transfer, which can help
guide the teaching focus to areas of predictable ease and/or
difficulty as endorsed by Swan (2011) in a nod to Robert Lado’s
contrastive analysis approach, especially in EFL (English as a foreign
language) environments with a uniform L1. This section concludes with
a discussion of the nature of the ELT publishing industry describing
it as largely conservative in relying on what has gone before and in
keeping with “commercial imperatives” constraining the market.
Chapter 3 surveys the evolution of English grammars from the original
(non-ELT) school grammars of the 16th century through the more
scientific grammars of the 20th century. Burton explains that the
original analyses of the structure of English derived from that of
Latin, which influenced what was to be included; however the two
grammars differed. He argues that what has been regarded as the
traditional ELT grammar syllabus (for teaching) is actually a
construct of the latter half of the 20th century, a relatively recent
phenomenon. Methodology in the first half of the 20th century actually
focused more on the memorization of vocabulary and phraseology rather
than on grammar rules and paradigms.
Chapters 4 and 5 cover interviews with professionals in the field to
discuss the decision-making processes regarding what was to be
included, in what order, and at what levels in published ELT
coursebooks. First, the ten interviewees are introduced: six from the
historical publishing industry and four involved in contemporary
published materials. Six open-ended questions were developed; three
“were designed to explore, respectively, the issues of the choice of
number of levels, overall grammatical content, and level allocation of
each grammar point” (p. 55). One question addresses conformity to
publisher expectations, and another explores outside influences; the
last asks each contributor for any final thoughts. Organizing themes
influencing the grammar canon from the ‘modern’ period identified from
the interviews include: norms & expectations, publishers,
institutions, the market/end users, and innovation. The consensus is
that publishers exert more control than in the past, and they in turn
are influenced by external pressures, such as from book sales and
academic research, e.g. in corpus linguistics. “[T]he monolithic ELT
grammar canon may need to be modified to match the needs of different
groups of learners in different communicative situations” (p. 81). The
next chapter goes on to cover the evolution and development of the ELT
canon in the publishing industry since the mid-20th century. As
discussed by the interviewees, typical grammar syllabuses originate
from what has gone before: prior authors, practitioner experience,
selection and grading criteria, and expansion of the level system.
Changes are noted as coming from within the canon itself (the
functional-notional syllabus, for example) and from the varying roles
of publishers and authors over the years and also from debates over
the selection and ordering of particular grammar points based on
frequency, such as whether the present continuous should be covered
before or after the present simple.
Chapter 6 represents a case study of contemporary teaching materials.
By examining the treatment and sequencing of three grammar points
(conditionals, relative clauses, and future verb forms) in five
coursebook series, an association is made to learner competency
descriptors in the English Grammar Profile (EGP), a searchable
database based on the Cambridge Learner Corpus, in order to compare
level assignments. For example, when are the forms taught in the
coursebooks, and when are they produced in the learner corpus? It is
hoped that such case studies can be generalizable to the entire
grammar canon following a comparison of their treatment in these five
essential coursebooks. The commercially successful, adult titles
selected for analysis are published internationally at six levels and
constitute a representative sample used for teaching General English
in a mainstream context. The conditionals typically covered in ELT
coursebooks are the ‘indicative conditionals’ (real situations) and
the ‘counterfactual conditionals,’ in which the past and past perfect
forms are used to indicate the subjunctive mood in English; Burton
finds this representation to ignore real past situations that are
attested in authentic usage data. The canonical pedagogical treatment
of relative clause structures is of two types: ‘defining’
(restrictive/identifying) or ‘non-defining’
(non-restrictive/non-identifying), and coursebooks are found to be
fairly consistent in their coverage. There are five canonical future
verb forms typically identified across coursebooks for teaching eight
general functions; this situation leads to frequent repetition and
revision across levels. Overall, while Burton finds a high level of
agreement in coverage across the five contemporary coursebook series
examined, he discerns more limited agreement in grammar content at the
advanced levels compared to the lower levels. More interestingly,
learners are shown to produce these grammar structures in the EGP at
earlier levels than those levels at which they are taught the
respective structures in the coursebooks!
Chapter 7 then reviews the evolution of how these three grammar points
have been dealt with and presented from early, purely descriptive,
primary sources of the 17th century to modern, more pedagogically
oriented ones. Titles chosen for the historical analysis came from
four categories: historical grammars, historical pedagogical grammars,
historical coursebooks, and late 20th century coursebooks. Criteria
for the selection of individual titles to review included having been
1) written by established writers in the field; 2) published by major
international houses; and 3) commercially successful. With
conditionals and relative clauses, there appears historically a shift
in emphasis from item (only the verb form/relative pronoun,
respectively) to pattern (the clause structures as a whole).
Similarly, we see English moving away from the idea of having a simple
future tense formed with “will” and “shall” towards expressing
futurity with a wide range of phrases in the move to pattern over
item.
The conclusion, Chapter 8, revisits the goals of the study: to explain
the canon as it is and to explore its origins. This historical
perspective documents the move from reference grammars largely used by
native speakers to pedagogical grammars as influenced by functional
linguistics, which incorporate the notion of choice for learners of
English. Previous titles have been highly influential on subsequent
ones, and the market/publishers have demonstrated more and more
control through the years, which has led to little variety in the
content of contemporary materials, resulting in a vicious cycle of
rather similar publications lacking in innovation. Because investment
costs are so high in publishing, there is a reluctance to risk change.
The author lists the following two limitations on his study: it
represents only a small subset of coursebooks in teaching General
English, and only a relatively small number of professionals were
interviewed. His finding that what gets included and in what order is
largely determined by what has gone before emphasizes the predominant
role of successful titles and has led to “a self-perpetuating cycle of
homogenous content and limited opportunities to review the established
canon or innovate from it” (p. 179). Burton calls for a more critical
analysis to determine relevance and efficacy for particular groups of
learners; he calls on practitioners to engage with researchers,
particularly by incorporating how technology can inform the grammar
teaching syllabus, especially from learner corpus analysis and
resources such as the EGP with “readily and freely available
information on how learners actually use grammar at different
competency levels” (p. 179).
EVALUATION
This title is relevant for ESL grammar teachers, ELT publishers,
coursebook authors, and syllabus designers. The introduction sets out
to analyze and explain the contemporary grammar canon by exploring its
origins and evolution.
Burton essentially recommends a critical evaluation of why the canon
is the way it is, deriving from a consensus of professionals. I found
the overlapping dichotomies discussed in Chapter 4 somewhat confusing:
contemporary/historical (where to draw the line),
publisher/author/teacher, canon/consensus. The author readily admits
that the 1990s is an arbitrary cutoff point for historical versus
modern materials. The title of Chapter 4 references “the canon today,”
whereas six of the interviewees are said to “represent the group of
people who have experience of the historical period” (p. 54). The
six-level ELT program is discussed at length here as the modern status
quo. I found it somewhat curious as to why the historical reviews are
placed after the contemporary descriptions. For example, Chapter 5 on
origins and change in ELT publishing is placed after the chapter on
the modern canon. Again, Chapter 7 on the history/evolution/origin of
the grammar canon comes after the presentation of the case as it
exists today in Chapter 6. Perhaps, putting the familiar first serves
as a frame for the historical presentations.
At the beginning of Chapter 6, Burton does provide a justification for
why he chose three specific grammar structures for our attention,
conditionals, relative clauses, and future forms: they were each
mentioned uncued by the interviewees, all receive generous coverage in
coursebook grammars, and all represent relatively different types of
grammatical structures although I would argue this last point, with
the conditional being both another type of dependent clause (like the
relative clause) and another special verb form (like the future). I
think a more interesting grammar point to have covered for L2 learners
in particular would have been treatments of the article system of
English since these little words prove to be particularly challenging
even at advanced levels. My personal feeling is that we spend entirely
too much time on the entire verb tense/aspect/voice system of English
when the relative usage frequencies (Biber, et al., 1999) dictate that
a lesser, more refined focus would do.
I am disheartened by the paucity of coverage of American textbooks,
authors, publishers or other professionals in the field. However, in
Chapter 3, Burton does mention the influence of research from the
United States on how to teach English scientifically and particularly
from the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan and
Charles C. Fries’ audiolingual approach emerging from the
structuralism of de Saussure. And he acknowledges how Biber, et al.’s
(1999) extensive use of corpus data “brought to the forefront the
question of how register interacts with the distribution and frequency
of grammatical features” (p. 40). Here, Burton documents the move
towards a more learner-focused approach as English becomes the lingua
franca of the world. However, all three of the publishers selected for
analysis are British: Oxford, Cambridge, and Longman. Not that these
are not my own top three, but I would like to have seen at least one
of the five coursebook titles from this side of the pond given their
highly-regarded, historical significance: Heinle/Thomson/Cengage
Learning, for example, which evolved into the highly engaging National
Geographic Learning. I can, nevertheless, understand how such an
inclusion would have complicated the scope and nature of this volume.
Ultimately, Burton has provided us with an explanation of why
pedagogical grammar coursebooks have come to be so similar in what
they offer: money. Selling textbooks seems to have become the priority
for quite some time now. Maybe it is time we look for and demand more
stylized materials that cater to our respective audiences and their
particular needs; for example, academic learners have a much different
linguistic repertoire than the quotidian demands of casual users, such
as for a preponderance of complex noun phrases versus that of phrasal
verbs (Biber, et al., 1999). After all, we cannot teach the entire
canon in the limited time we have with our students, so why not design
a curriculum in the interest of efficiency with the help of applied
linguistics research in corpus linguistics? Since the focus here is on
ELT for non-native speakers, on the formal register of academic
writing, and on corpus informed language teaching materials, I would
hope future coursebooks will give some attention to the complex noun
phrase, consisting of extensive pre- and post-modifying structures
such as prepositional and participial phrases, which cause so much
difficulty for L2 learners even at advanced levels because of the
frequency therein of the less-salient function words.
This author brings critical awareness of register variation in
teaching to the fore. Rather than providing textbooks that are all
things to allcomers, let us provide boutique materials for the
discriminating customer. It seems change is overdue. Providing
teachers and learners with choices dependent on their intent for
learning would bring new life to the field and take advantage of
insights that technological advances can give us. I commend the author
for urging us to pay more attention to research in applied linguistics
to inform what should be taught and in what order, especially in the
area of learner corpora, which can show us where and when our students
are faltering. Also, native speaker corpora make useful references for
language in particular realms of usage. This recommendation is in
keeping with the gradual move towards reliance on usage/description to
dictate prescription. Language is constantly changing both through
time and space; perhaps, our teaching materials should as well.
REFERENCES
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad & Edward
Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow:
Longman.
Swan, Michael. 2011. Grammar. In James Simpson (ed.), The Routledge
Handbook of Applied
Linguistics, 557-570. Abingdon: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Craig is a long-time grammar aficionado, herself a victim of the
predominant grammar-translation method of old, and currently working
as a writing consultant for University of North Georgia with a
background in corpus linguistics, lexicogrammar, contrastive analysis,
and ESL academic skills teaching in higher education both in the US
and abroad.



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