The Tao of English Grammar Course is a meta-course which looks at the forces that lie behind traditional grammar rules.

In my first year as a teacher, in 2002, I attended a course on Language Awareness and it changed the way I saw grammar. Much of the material sought to find the ‘why’ behind the rules, and the key ideas were largely drawn from a book by Michael Lewis called The English Verb: An Exploration of Meaning & Structure. I liked many of Lewis’ ideas a great deal, but disagreed with others.  Over thefollowing years I have developed them into my own way of explaining the regulatory forces of English grammar.

I called my ideas the Tao of English because they talk about the fundamental forces that govern and explain how verbs and verb structures work in English.

Over the years I’ve presented my ideas to language learners and teachers alike, and with the odd exception, have had a very strong and positive reaction. To help students process these ideas (which are radically different from traditional ways of talking about grammar), I made a set of six YouTube videos which present the basic ideas in the Tao of English.

In March 2011 I was asked for and gave permission for Parts 2 and 3 to be used in an online lecture given by the instructor of Speech and Hearing Science: Children, Communication and Language Ability with the University of Illinois’ Office of Online & Continuing Education.

Here are the six videos:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6