English Grammar In Use

English Grammar In Use is a very good program for learning English, but it was written in 1994 and was designed for the DOS operating system. It can be run in Windows using one of the DOS emulators, but this is just below.

The program is done very well. It contains 130 lessons (Units), which cover the full course of English grammar. Each lesson has a theoretical and practical part. In theory, everything is quite clear, all on examples. After learning the theory, you move on to practical exercises, where you need to enter answer choices in specific fields. Immediately after entering the word (or combination of words), you will receive a message about whether you wrote it correctly or not (bottom right, finger up or down). You've got a few tries, after which the program will give you a hint. The number of attempts, as well as some other parameters, can be configured in a special program SETUP.EXE. The file of the English Grammar In Use program itself is called E_GR.EXE - it should be run.

After starting, you will see the first Unit. There are control buttons at the bottom. To select Unit-a, press the Unit button or press F2 on the keyboard. Here you can enter the lesson number or go to the table of contents and select the desired lesson there. Use the "Pg Up" and "Pg Dn" buttons at the bottom right to scroll up and down the page. Once you press the button, you make the page move up or down, pressing the same button for the second time will stop the page. In general, the programme will be useful both for self-study and for use by teachers to teach students in computer rooms.

"English Grammar In Use software offers comprehensive, interactive English grammar lessons for self-study or classroom use."

It is unlikely that you have a DOS operating system at home or in a computer classroom of an educational institution, so now we will consider the easiest way to run the program in Windows through the DOS emulator. We used DOSBox emulator and D.O.G. graphical shell for this emulator. You need to download both and install them on your computer. DOSBox works on all versions of Windows up to Windows 7, so English Grammar In Use will work on any Windows computer.

After we have installed both components, we need to run D.O.G. and in the first window select the DOSBox executable file, i.e. go to the folder where you installed the emulator, and select the DOSBox.exe file. Next we write any name and version. Now we see the D.O.G. interface, which is linked to the DOSBox emulator (see screenshots on the right). In the D.O.G. window we need to drag and drop the E_GR.EXE and SETUP.EXE files. As mentioned above, SETUP.EXE is used to configure the program, and if you do not plan to change the default settings, you can SETUP.EXE not to run and, accordingly, not to add to the list of D.O.G. Now to run one of the added files, you need to select it, and press Enter on the keyboard. In general, the procedure is not easy, but then you only need to run D.O.G. and run English Grammar In Use from it.