During the 23 years of running the children's  3 week summer courses  I developed a system of teaching that gives primacy to

A CHILD FRIENDLY REFERENCE GRAMMAR 

• A grammar, which is necessary to make up for the relative dispersiveness of functional text books*. (a functional approach cannot present grammar except in the most passing fashion, otherwise it betrays its own principle that grammar should not be detached from context.) 

   *See intensive courses at  italian schools for further thoughts on this matter.

• Children need to be liberated from text books: grammar is open ended!!
• Yet the grammar that teachers have recourse to, given the nature of the text books is mostly harmful; too pedantic, and rule dominated and often varying from day to day as it is "explained" or coming from  Grammar books  that  very difficult for the students to self access.

• Over the last 23 years I’ve had a lot of Italian German, and Austrian children at my summer school for 3 week courses. If you only have 3 weeks to effect a change it concentrates the mind on finding quicker ways of helping the children!
• My main belief is that modern teaching techniques and their text books can be too dispersive.
• However teaching "Grammar" often confuses. Instead of focusing attention on the basic grammatical forms of language, the enterprise is drowned in pedantic "metalanguage". Often grammar teaching makes matters worse.
• I felt that I could do it differently. My grammar is the result.

• I decided that at Middlesmoor we needed to give the visitors security with the very basic language patterns which were at the same time clothed in examples of immediate utility: "Can I have some water please?" " I haven’t seen her" "When are we playing football?etc.This explains what may otherwise seem strange choices of order and precedence: for example that I deal with the present continuous first. I do this because it is much more useful than the habitual present. (after all children don’t want to ask questions about habits but about now or the future).
• So my book is I hope a sensible compromise. I want one and the same text to satisfy the teachers and the students. The explanation is kept to an unpedantic minimum yet they are still "correct" . They are to be found in the grey sections leaving space for the examples to breath in.
• I want the pupils to say with relief "Ah this is clear and it only explains what is necessary for me." this should make the teacher’s job easier.
• One further point about clarity. Clarity is not just a matter of explanation. Everything must have a clear visual lay-out. That’s why over-explanation is so fatal; it clogs up the page. You could almost call the book a grammarised phrase book. Just the look of most grammar books is terrifying!
• This book exemplifies grammar You cold almost call it a grammarised phrase book!

• Every book needs a theoretical justification and this one couldn’t be just based on my pragmatic summer course solutions.
• When I started making the book by happy chance I went to a lecture in Hamburg by Michael Lewis. He now gets an audience of 500 at Milan British Council conferences. He is a proponent of what he calls "The lexical Approach". What is relevant for us is his idea that the English language has a base of about 2500 "institutional utterances" e.g. "I haven’t got any time now" and that there are also smaller constancies that he calls sentence stems of the sort "if I were you I’d...." that have open ends.
• Another serious source is Schlacter.......

• A lot of our teaching in Middlesmoor makes "unnatural" use of very grammar rich phrases. The activities are fun but like our grammar plays, all the activities by using these example sentences from the grammar, help make the basic structures of English familiar and friendly to these young foreigners.!! One girl  who came to us for nine years says that it is this firm base of "nuggets" (example phrases) that she finds always ready to hand when she is talking English. 

  Many of my ex pupils (such as Francesca Dolzani) tell me that years after their summer in Middlesmoor when they are speaking English, it is those well memorised "nuggets" that come to their rescue while trying to speak English. They are like friendly stepping stones across uncertainties..

• Children learn languages quickly in the natural state because communication is desired by them and also because the language they use is so narrow, and it is endlessly recycled, repeated and refashioned. Children work outwards from a tight circle of usefulness.
• The grammar plays are a way of making up for the fact that class room situations in which children are taught are all more or less artificial and that the ways of "natural language acquisition" cannot be transferred to text books.
• It is, I hope a realistic compromise. On the one hand it is artificail in the sense that "grammar" is not known as something explicit to the "native speaker" child who picks up a language as English expresses it with one of its artful phrasal verbs. On the other hand we have honestly admitted our artificiality in teaching "bits of language" (we’ve written a "Grammar") and we’ve then tried to be at the same time "communicative" with the plays and suggested activities.
• My preferred method of teaching would be to base everything on grammar and special dictionaries and to use the blackboard as note pad for collecting information about the children’s real world of experience.

• One of the assumptions of my teaching is that  none of us anymore, adult or student, exercise our memory. It should be obvious to anyone that language learning requires memorisation. Out of fear of so called rote learning we think everything should proceed "naturally" However, we learn our own language with considerable repetitive practice. We just don’t notice how children learn. A child of 2 who said to me "I swimmed in the river" was thinking grammatically. He was hypothesising regularuty!! The so called "natural" methodology of langauge teaching is a sham. What we need is artificial procedures that mimic certain repetitive practice situations in the native learner and these procedures should be fun so that the repetition will be more palatable. 
•  In the grammar book there are countless suggestions for practising and recycling the specimen sentences ("nuggets’) on the grammar pages, and games for learning vocabulary, for who in the "natural or "communicative approach" is doing the artificial / unnatural business of teaching vocabulary? In my experience, running a language school for foreign children, I see that they know hardly any words in a really active sense; ie. Words that are easily recoverable to their memories.