Introduction
In the past, English grammar instruction focused primarily on the sentence level. Sentence-based drills were used to teach tenses, articles, negation, question formation, passive voice, and many other construction types. The problem with this narrow approach was that learning sentence-level grammar did not result in learners being able to use the English language for communication. There are in fact only a few local rules of English grammar that can be usefully taught and practiced as strictly context-free, sentence-level phenomena:
Refl exive pronoun objects: Mary accidentally cut herself.
Gerund verbals after prepositions: They were prevented from leaving the party .
Determiner-noun agreement: This book/These books might interest you.
All other rules of grammar require some context in order for learners to understand when and why they are used. 2
By artifi cially creating contexts through the use of adverbials, many verb tenses can be elicited and practiced at the sentence level:
Present tense: She rides her bicycle for 30 minutes every day.