Useful books/worksheets for an adult learning English.

[SantasLittleMonkeyButler]

Good morning - not sure if I'm posting this in the best topic, but seemed more appropriate than chat.

A colleague of mine is originally from an eastern European country. Her spoken English is perfectly good enough to be understood, fluent I suppose in many ways.

However, she would like to start studying towards her professional qualifications and our employer has advised her that in order to do so successfully, she should improve her written English skills first. She would also like to improve her conversational English. Whilst she can be understood pretty easily, her phrasing often isn't the same as we would use (for example, she will say that she has "walked the stair" rather than "walked up the stairs" or "put the bowl" rather than "put the bowl down" - that sort of thing!)

She has asked me whether I know of any books or worksheets she could use to help, as I have children at school. However, my school age DCs are 16 & 6. One is taking A-Levels, the work for which I think would be too advanced and the other is just in Year 2 - so I'm not sure if her reading books etc., would be a bit patronising considering my colleague is an intelligent woman who can actually speak English already?

Could anybody lead me to either downloadable worksheets or texts on Amazon (etc.) that I could recommend to her please?

Any advice greatly appreciated!

For grammar, there's a really good Cambridge series, starting with 'Essential Grammar in Use' by Raymond Murphy. It includes the answers and she can get it from Amazon. It might be a bit easy but I suspect the sections on prepositions will be helpful. Subsequent books are more advanced. A couple of free online resources - skills wise has ESOL worksheets up to level 2, I think, and you can try breaking news.com with loads of recorded talks and accompanying worksheets, which can be quite advanced.

Otherwise try adult education/FE for evening classes - but they will charge for ESOL. Functional skills and GCSE are free.

Cambridge FCE followed by IELTS would be good course books to get - with listening downloads. Perfect for an adult. 2nd hand on Amazon if budget is low.

I agree, FCE and IELTS can be useful if she needs to work on her reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. If she's going to take the courses at uni, then she might be required to pass one of these exams first to demonstrate that her English is sufficient to study at that level.

If it's just grammar and vocabulary she needs, then the The Raymond Murphy series is very useful for targeting grammar problems. Another good one is 'Oxford English Grammar Course' by Michael Swan. OUP also publish similar series that covers vocabulary.

Any school work done by children would be completely irrelevant as she doesn't need Shakespear or creative writing. She's most likely to need more accuracy at sentence level and broader vocabulary.

Thank you all very much, that's very helpful. Quite a few ideas to look at .

She's most likely to need more accuracy at sentence level and broader vocabulary.

Yes, that's it. I couldn't really see how anything DD does at school or for homework would be terribly helpful TBH - and the reading books would be too easy.