User reactions to A Comprehensive Grammar of English

// World Englishes. 1987. Vol. 6, No.3, pp. 277-279It is a well recognized fact that A Comprehensive Grammar of English,co-authored by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik, and published by Longman in 1985, is a monumental work and will remain a major source of reference on contemporary English for decades. As the book is of immense importance to researchers and teachers of English all over the world, it was felt that an informal survey of users’ reactions to the book may be of interest to the readers of WE. Accordingly, a questionnaire (see Appendix) was circulated among a group of 29 graduate students (12 native, 17 international) enrolled in a course on Pedagogical Grammar of English in the spring of 1987. Almost all the students were candidates for the MA in Teaching English as a Second Language in the Division of English as an International Language at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The questionnaire was devised keeping in mind the three requirements suggested by Greenbaum (in this volume): a reference grammar should be comprehensive, it should make it easier for its users to retrieve required information, and it should be written in a style ‘accessible’ to very many different kinds of users. This brief report presents the results of the survey.