edited by Chris Sion

Alta Book Center Publishers 2004

1-932383-00-X

Review published ETp 38 - May 2005

According to the curious note on its inside cover, this book is ‘dedicated to all those language students throughout the world who are just sitting there in class’. My own interpretation of this is that Sion and his colleagues aim to get those students doing much more than just sit there. Another of their goals is that this book be ‘user-friendly for language teachers’. They just might have achieved both those worthwhile, ambitious objectives.

The book, a new edition of an old favourite, has activities for every language level, labelled helpfully ‘Low intermediate and above’, or ‘Advanced’, or ‘All’ and so on. Moreover, these labels appear prominently throughout the contents pages, as well as at the top of each ‘recipe’ page.

The contents page itself is segmented, so that activities for ‘Group dynamics’ are chunked together, whereas ‘Creative writing and thinking’ are chunked together in the following unit; all told, there are eight such units (the last being ‘Fun and games’), comprising 81 activities. The contents page also directs your attention to the index, which has these three important sections: ‘Instant Recipes’ (activities which require no preparation), ‘Recipes by Level’ and ‘Recipes by Language Function’.

This intensely user-friendly map-routing of the book is its best feature, regardless of the quality of the ‘recipes’ themselves (which I’ll come to in a moment). Imagine yourself, rushing toward school for a lastminute substitution. You pick up this book as soon as you get to the staffroom, and within, I reckon, 45 seconds, you’ve identified two or three decent activities that you can take into class.

The activities themselves really are as heralded: ‘well-seasoned activities for language learning’. Experienced teachers might read some of these recipes and think they’ve seen it all before. Nonetheless, it’s still wholesome fare to serve up for your students on those days when you might be a bit tired, uninspired, late or disorganised.

Some of the recipes are a bit wordy, so inexperienced teachers may need to allow themselves at least 15 minutes to get their heads around them. Bear that in mind. In any case, though, each recipe has two important info-boxes, ‘materials’ and ‘before class’, emblazoned across the top to help you get a feel for what’s below (and to help you decide whether you really have time to digest this recipe properly before class, or whether you should instead carry on scanning the rest of the menu).

Whether you’re a puffed-out old practitioner or an overwhelmed newcomer, you’ll need a book like this more often than you might admit.