Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

particular schools in particular

countries

, can never be fully met by the materials themselves.

Indeed, most users seem to accept that what they choose will in many ways

be a compromise and that they will have to adapt the materials to their

situation.

264 | Grammar across turns and sentences

Cambridge Grammar of English

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[from a book of tasks and activities for second-language learners]

Competitive activities that pit pairs against pairs and threes against threes

are

excellent for fostering collaboration and mutual help within each team. In this

heightened atmosphere a lot of learning takes place without the students

noticing they are ‘studying’.

In many of 

these activities the students’ language task is to look at a set of

sentences and decide which are correct and which are wrong. We believe that

this testing of their own criteria is central to students building up a strong

internal monitor to help them speak and write correctly. 

Pronoun ties alone may often be felt to be too weak across paragraph boundaries,

and a definite determiner + noun may be preferable, as in the example above,

where these used alone, without repeating activities in the second paragraph, may

not have provided a strong and clear enough link. Equally, to have said ‘their

language task’ instead of the students’ language task in the second paragraph may

not have been felt to be a strong enough tie.