What lies behind the book is the desire to make a guide to teaching, or coaching, as I would like to put, more human. The stimulus has been mostly a French and Italian speaking population over the years and I wanted to give them something more than cold facts on what rules are and when to apply them. The newer books although illustrative only show snapshots of particular lives that the student may not want to relate to, and this has urged me on to amass information which would explain how that information could be helpful. At the same token somebody had to print that it is not necessary to be knowledgeable about world populations and celebrity issues in order to become functional in the language and that if the person wants to learn he should at least be aware of what lies behind the modern usage of expressions, idiomatic speech and phrasal verbs.
I am saying this with the first hand knowledge of teaching and integrating grammatical elements in conversations so the individual can see beyond the tense and make it work for him.
After so many years of looking through grammar books with scanty explanations, because the ESL teacher is not expected to give a run down on the origin of the language I have decided to mention word origins and older forms of speech especially to my Latin friends as the language is in many cases derived from the old French, Spanish or Italian.
But I would also integrate activities, which would get the student to feel comfortable using a word in different ways or even taking the word apart of it is a compound one or has a prefix or more than one negative form. Students over the years loved my slant on integrating language with vocabulary because the more words he remembers the greater the chance of being more articulated.
