Welcome to the Provincial English textbook to fulfill the requirements for the Adult Basic Education (ABE) Provincial English Course. This text is an adaptation by an assistant professor with seven years of post-secondary ABE English teaching experience.

How the Text is Organized

While navigating through the textbook, you’ll notice that the major part of the textbook you’re working within is identified at the top of the page. We hope this helps you to navigate between sections and subsections and to understand the relationships between them.

How Should You Use This Text?

This text can be used by an instructor of an Provincial English class on its own to satisfy all the requirements of the course. Your instructor may want you to read through all parts of this text to make sure that all material is covered. Your instructor may, of course, choose to present material to you in other formats or through their own lessons to you in class.

Gendered and Gender-Neutral Language

As you read, you may notice that we use a variety of pronouns such as she/her, he/him, or they/them to refer to a person we’re discussing. Our goal is to represent all people, regardless of gender, and to do so in a balanced way. Therefore, in some paragraphs, we may designate “she” as the pronoun, while in others “he” will stand in for the person being written about. However, you’ll also come across “they” being used as a singular pronoun, which may be confusing at first. The pronoun “they” allows a single person to represent any gender, or no gender, including those genders that aren’t accurately represented by “he” and “she.” It’s important to consider gender-neutral language in your own writing, so we wanted to make sure we modeled what that looks like in this text.

Links and References in Online and Print Versions of This Text

The online text includes links and a few embedded videos, but we have ensured that web address are provided for readers using a print version so they can find the same resource.