“Oxon’s A Short Approach to English- Banlgadesh Ebong Varot Theke Prokashito A Jabot Kaler Sorbobrihot Grammar” Taken from the forword of the book Foreword Though in English language teaching learning terminology, we often talk about four skills, the evolution of a given language has two stages and forms: oral form and written form, the same way as we have oral literature and written literature. In colloquial language or verbal communication, emphasis is given on communication of ideas and information. But in written language, grammatical rules are strictly followed, as written language should be written correctly. Hence comes the grammar. The grammar is there to regulate the language. We know that a language undergoes changes and modifications not fast ‘but slowly. In order to cope with the changing form of a language, the grammar has to be modified and updated as well. That is why a comprehensive grammar is vital to any language. As the non-native speakers of English as a second foreign language, we are generally reluctant to follow the strict grammatical rules. But for successful and effective verbal and written communication, a mastery of the grammatical rules is of immense importance. For that we have to depend upon English grammars written by authors from English speaking countries, especially from Britain and the United States. They are always written in English, which is not quite easily comprehensible to the non-native speakers here in Bangladesh. We were really in need of a comprehensive grammar of English in which grammatical terms, rules and usages would be explained in Bangla with a lot of examples. A Short Approach to English by Md. Mohiuddin Mahi is such a book of English grammar. It covers all the topics related to a better understanding and a better use of English. Mohiuddin undertook the tedious and exhausting task of consulting a huge number of books to make his work a really comprehensive and updated one. One of the corpuses called The Bank of English of Collins Cobuild HarperCollins Publishers, the University of Birmingham includes some 524 million words. There are other corpora as well, like the British National Corpus, Oxford English Corpus, and Chambers Word track. [A corpus is a collection of millions of words to make ensure how the English language is actually used today. A Short Approach to English is based on the books of those corpuses. Therefore, it can easily be relied on. There is an index at the end of the book which will help the learners find out the items or topics or rules that they want to know about. As I was informed, this is the first of its kind in South Asia with such an index. He also discusses the variations of and exceptions to the rules/usages. Mohiuddin spent a whole year in writing this book. In cases of confusions and ambiguities, he cites a lot of authorities/experts related to the field.
