Ray Murphy - Interview Transcript

Cambridge University Press Transcript of interview with Raymond Murphy English Grammar in Use Fourth Edition and Online December 2011

Around 1980, I was teaching at a language school in Oxford, teaching mainly intermediate students and they came from all over the world, mixed nationalities and mixed first language backgrounds. They were also mixed in other ways, in their educational experience for example, and in their expectations, and that includes their attitude to grammar. So there’s a problem focussing on grammar because the needs and wishes of the students are so varied, and also the fact that they are only here for two or three weeks. They can focus on grammar anywhere in the world as long as they have got a book or something, some source of information, but they don’t get all the practice which they could get in the classroom. So it was a rather unsatisfactory situation dealing with grammar in the classroom as I was teaching it at that time. And it didn’t make much sense doing grammar in class basically, for the reasons I have just given.

On the other hand, students did have grammar problems, lots of questions and queries, confusions, gaps in their knowledge, and often they wanted those addressed. They would also ask if I could recommend a grammar book that would help them find the answers to the queries they had. And I, at that time, this is around 1980, couldn’t really recommend a good grammar book for students – I found them too academic, I don’t think they were really written with the learner in mind. So I wanted to write some material to give to students to answer their queries, without having to do grammar with the whole class.

So, I wrote a series of worksheets, and each of these dealt with a particular point of grammar, it might be the difference between two tenses, the past continuous and the past simple, or it might be a specific point like ‘used to’ – “I used to do something” as opposed to “I am used to doing something”. Each worksheet had a topic like that and it consisted of three parts, an explanation section which explained the grammar concerned, dealt with the problems concerned with examples, and exercises, a number of easy to do exercises, uncomplicated exercises, just for the learner to clarify in his or her mind the information they had just received. And then there was another sheet of paper which had the answers.

These were kept in the school library and they worked very well.

And well, I did about 30 of these, and they were very popular with students, students liked them, and I thought, well, I could get this published maybe. I approached three publishers and Cambridge University Press were really the only ones to respond positively. And we got

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on with it, they agreed, they gave me a contract and I wrote the book based on these worksheets.

I remember getting a phone call actually after about a year, from Cambridge University Press, saying that sales have suddenly taken off, that they were higher than expected, and the book was becoming quite popular, at least in certain countries. So I knew it wasn’t going to be unsuccessful at that stage. And then year by year, it got better and better and better, which of course I had never expected. And you never know how long that is going to last, it can maybe last two years, five years, ten years – it’s gone for 25 years now. So I think it happened pretty quickly that we realised that it was going to sell quite well.

There’ve been three editions so far, with the fourth one soon to be published. It’s great to have an opportunity to improve and correct and refine things a little, rework them, make things a bit clearer, reword something, and I quite enjoy doing that. It’s also an opportunity to update things from a language point of view, and there’s a lot cultural change and lifestyle change in 25 years, changing things like that is important.

Now with the fourth edition, there’s going to be an online version, which is really the biggest feature of the fourth edition. So you have the opportunity to access it online, as well as in print.

I am very interested in languages and language learning. I love the history of languages, historical linguistics, and etymology, that sort of stuff, the way languages relate to one another – I find it fascinating. I love reading about it, talking about it, and doing it – I go to language classes, I enjoy that experience very, very much.

English Grammar in Use Fourth Edition and Online: www.lovegrammar.org

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