Lester - Practice Makes Perfect English Articles and Determiners Up Close

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This book focuses on the meaning and use of a large and important class of pre-adjective noun modifiers: articles and determiners. This book is unique in that it deals only with this one special group of noun modifiers. Consequently, it is able to provide a much greater in-depth treatment than would be possible in a more conventional grammar book that also covers a hundred other topics. While many of the topics and issues covered will be familiar to you, the depth and detail of the coverage will address many issues that will be totally new to you.

This book is intended for advanced English learners. It assumes that you are comfortable with a college-level English vocabulary. The grammatical vocabulary, however, is quite ordinary. The terms used in this book are ones that you have been using since high school.

The book contains a number of short exercises, all with answers provided in the Answer key. The purpose of the exercises is for you to test your own understanding of a concept or to practice a particular skill or technique. These exercises are important as a way for you to ensure that what you have studied has really been learned. It is all too easy to have a passive understanding of the material without realizing that you are dependent on the support provided by the instruction material.

This book has two goals, one obvious and one not so obvious. The first and most obvious goal is to help you use articles and determiners correctly. Articles and determiners are some of the most difficult words for nonnative speakers to use correctly. Since they are also some of the most frequently used words in English, the opportunity for nonnative speakers to make mistakes with them is nearly unlimited.

A substantial portion of the text is devoted to a second goal: helping you understand the sometimes quite subtle implications in the way native speakers use articles and determiners, especially in informal, conversational settings. Accordingly, much of the book deals with issues of usageexploring the consequences of different stylistic choices in the ways we use articles and determiners.

There are two main components. deals with each category of article in turn. Historically, grammar books recognized only two articles: the indefinite article a/an and the definite article the. However, we will add two additional articles: some/any (which we will treat as a unit) and the zero article, . (A zero article is the option of choosing to have no overt article where one would normally be expected. Here is a sentence with two zero articles: Onions give meindigestion.)

deals with determiners, which are a large and heterogeneous group of pre-adjective noun modifiers that determine which noun is being talked about. There are two main types of determiners: definite determiners and quantifiers. Definite determiners serve to define or specify the noun modified by the determiners. Here are some examples of definite determiners:

Quantifiers are determiners that specify the quantity or amount of the noun being modified. Here are some typical examples of quantifiers: