An Advanced English Course for Foreign Students [antikvár]

PREFATORY NOTEDuring the course of some ten years devoted to theteaching of English to foreign students, I have noticedthat, while there are a large number of fairly goodelementary textbooks for foreigners, there is a real needfor an advanced course which will help pupils to under-stand and use the more complicated grammatical con-structions, the idiomatic expressions, and the compoundverbs. By " compound " verbs, I mean those whosemeaning is modified or completely changed by theaddition of one or more prepositions or prepositionaladverbs. I have found that while, on the one hand,the average foreign pupil is often able to express himselffairly correctly in a kind of over-simplified " foreigners'English," he is, on the other hand, generally quiteincapable of reading an English novel or play, or ofunderstanding an ordinary conversation properly. Hewill puzzle over a sentence like " John dropped in thisevening," quite unawrare that " to drop in " is a groupwith a meaning quite apart from that of the words takenseparately ; and he is completely floored by idiomaticexpressions like " to burn the candle at both ends," or," to come off with flying colours."Moreover, no matter how well they have been taughtat home, I have found few foreigners able to expressthemselves correctly when they attempt anything morecomplicated than the simplest grammatical constructions.I feel that this is due to a defect of method in theirteaching. Most grammars begin with the treatment ofthe noun, followed in succession by that of the adjective,