Language Landscapes: The ESL teacher's guide to how English works

Formats Available

• PDF
• Hardcopy

Conditions of Use

Attribution
CC BY

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Some key concepts, terms, and ways of thinking about English grammar
• 2 Standards, Standard Englishes, and what to teach
• 3 Categories and functions: An overview
• 4 Adverbs and prepositions
• 5 Verbs, tense, and aspect
• 6 Syntax trees
• 7 Speech and the sound system
• 8 Analysing vocabulary
• 9 The writing system
• 10 Questions and interrogatives 
• 11 Negation
• 12 Categories, functions, and constructions
• 13 Fluency and flow
• 14 Information packaging
• 15 Coherence and cohesion
• 16 Pragmatics
• 17 Conversations
• 18 Subordination and coordination 
• 19 Relative constructions
• 20 The nature of grammaticality 
• Appendix A: Understanding language proficiency 
• Appendix B: List of prepositions
• Appendix C: List of determinatives 
• Appendix D: Ordered list of teachable graphemes
• Glossary
• References
• Index

About the Book

Language landscapes is a practical map of English for TESL educators, built around form–meaning pairings and the needs of real classrooms. Adopting a CGEL-informed framework, it stabilizes the category – function distinction (e.g., determinatives vs determiner function), pares back overloaded labels (especially in the adverb/preposition space), and introduces syntax trees as a teacher’s analytic lens rather than a student exercise. Early chapters address standards and normativity alongside a usable model of grammaticality; the book then moves through phonology (with Southern Ontario reference vowels and connected-speech processes), vocabulary (frequency, distribution, deliberate practice), orthography and phonics, and high-utility constructions (questions, negation, relatives). Later chapters treat information packaging, coherence and cohesion, pragmatics and conversation (including digital turn-taking), and fluency across skills, connecting analysis to instructional decisions and trade-offs with accuracy. Throughout, the book foregrounds counter-example reasoning, common TESL pitfalls, and modular sequencing so instructors can enter via fluency/discourse, sound/writing, or grammar proper. The approach is functionalist and usage-aware, emphasizing community conventions, processing pressures, and change over time; trees and constructional patterns are tools for understanding, not ends in themselves. With concise diagnostics (e.g., NICER properties of auxiliaries), worked examples, glossaries, and cross-references, Language landscapes helps teachers say more with fewer rules – and better justify what to teach, when, and why.

Accessibility

Language Landscapes is a 536-page PDF generated from LaTeX, and the latex source is provided https://github.com/langsci/555 so it has a complete text layer: the full text is selectable, searchable, and machine-readable, with a linked table of contents, numbered chapters and sections, a glossary, and an index. All 85 figures and 67 tables are numbered and captioned, and the captions describe what each one shows.

About the Contributors

Author

Brett Reynolds is Professor of EAP and TESL at Humber Polytechnic and Adjunct Professor of linguistics at University of Toronto. His research focuses on the micro-syntax of English words and the ontology of grammaticality.

Ancillaries

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