Abstract

Most current ESL textbooks discuss how to 'make comparisons' in English. This is typically accomplished by teaching the comparative form of the adjective generally directly followed by a 'than' clause (explicit basis of comparison). This study aims to look at other ways of making comparisons used by the native speaker and investigates the frequency of the explicit basis of comparison as it occurs in native speech. For this, the British National Corpus (BNC) was investigated. Results show that ways of comparing other than adjective comparatives are more frequently used and that the explicit basis of comparison is used only occasionally by native speakers. It is argued that this has clear implications for ESL teachers and textbook writers.