Grammar by the book : the passive in pedagogical grammars for EFL/ESL teachers

Grammar by the Book is a study of how the English passive, as both a linguistic phenomenon and a learning/teaching issue, is presented in pedagogical grammars for EFL/ESL teachers – grammar books aimed at trainee and practising teachers of English as a foreign/second language and intended to supply metalinguistic information on English grammar, practice in language analysis and error correction as well as an overview of grammar teaching activities and the typical problems experienced by EFL/ESL learners. Whereas a great deal of ink has been poured by theoretical and descriptive linguists in the last fifty years in attempts to conceptualise and describe the passive, very little awareness appears to exist of this recent research among language teachers. Pedagogical grammars for teachers are arguably a concrete attempt to redress the situation inasmuch as they are primarily aimed at bridging the gap between linguistic research and the practical concerns of the teacher. Spanning approximately thirty years (1978-2004), the sample of ten grammars on which this study is based originated not only in Inner Circle countries (Canada, USA, UK, New Zealand), but also in former British colonies (India, Hong Kong, Singapore) and in a country where English is learnt as a foreign language (Colombia). Through the analysis of the verbal descriptions, the examples and the diagrams featured in the corpus of ten presentations of the passive as well as the subject-specific metalanguage used, the book pieces together a picture of the way an important grammatical phenomenon has been turned into a grammaticographical product and explores how insights from the last one hundred years of linguistic and applied linguistic research have been mediated and represented for a non-academic audience. A subsidiary focus of the analysis is the evaluation of the ‘fitness-for-purpose’ of the grammars, i.e. whether they achieve the purposes that a teacher-oriented pedagogical presentation should serve.