Wren & Martin

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P. C. Wren and H. Martin wrote a series of English grammar textbooks for children of British officials posted in India. Later these books were also prescribed for Indian schools. The books were published in 1935. Material on composition was added much later. The result is a series of textbooks still in use at most Indian schools. The material in the books is largely based on "The Manual of English grammar and composition" by J.C Nesfield.

The books became a classic and generations of students and teachers swore by it. The grammatical concepts are explained well followed by exercises to test understanding. However these books are outdated in content as new advances have been made in theoretical linguistics and many usages for words have changed. The books were and still continue to be revised by N.D.V Prasada Rao who unfortunately has edited many useful sections such as "parsing" and pruned the all important sentence analysis. Many of the passages for analysis are dated and these happen to be extracts from Victorian and early twentieth century writers.

New books since then have been published incorporating the latest research on grammar and new concepts in English language teaching but only a hafcfdndful of Indian schools use these.

The series roughly:

Elementary English grammar

A first book of English grammar and composition and series of books for use by middle-school students

High school English grammar and composition

Also refer to:

P. C. Wren Indian English English grammar linguistics

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