| 50 - Book Reviews |
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The Creative Classroom: teaching languages outside the box by Hall Houston Lynx Publishing 2007 1-894929-12-8 The Creative Classroom seems to be the latest book with the word creative in the title but perhaps the first ELT book to focus solely on applying creative thinking techniques to the classroom. Consisting of around 100 activities, it also has an introduction giving some background to creative thinking techniques, an extensive bibliography and a ‘bonus section’ containing interviews with writers on creativity. The activities themselves are divided into five sections, including one specifically for teachers to help them solve classroomrelated problems. The other sections are: short activities, classic creativity activities, individual activities and group activities. The main body of The Creative Classroom comprises well-known and not so well-known brainstorming techniques adapted for the language classroom. For example, there are ‘what if’ questions (eg What if it was illegal to sneeze?); a variety of random association-type ideas (eg rolling dice to relate two different ideas); and ideas involving imagining (eg What would a specified well-known person have to say about a certain problem? What would it be like to be a different gender?). There are many new and interesting ideas included, too. One I liked is called morphological synthesis, where a grid is created with things students have already done in class on one side (eg drilling) and things they would like to do on the other (eg listening to music): the meeting points represent new activities (eg a song drill). Upside-down brainstorming, where you give students solutions and they work out the problems, is another simple but effective idea. As it functions as a concise guide to brainstorming techniques, The Problem- Solving Classroom might have been a better name for this book, and since it is much more focused on practising than teaching language (references to specific language points are hard to find), the subtitle practising languages outside the box would also be more apt. This book will not give you any simple new creative ways to teach the present perfect or help students remember vocabulary. However, it does give plenty of suggestions for finding new ideas, and therefore it is useful as a tool to help teachers explore their work. The activities require minimal preparation, are clearly described and are easy to use. It will be beneficial for teachers of students who enjoy problem-solving, especially a conversation class, or perhaps ESP class if the problems are related to the students’ field. It could also be used as a stimulus for writing. Simon Mumford Izmir, Turkey Cambridge Grammar of English by Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy CUP 2006 0-521-58846-4 Weighing in just short of 1,000 pages, the Cambridge Grammar of English provides an authoritative overview of English grammar in its spoken and written forms. It is based on years of extensive research, and draws on naturallyoccurring samples of language from the Cambridge International Corpus and the CANCODE corpus of recorded spoken data. What really distinguishes this book from other descriptive grammars is the separate treatment of spoken and written language. The grammar of spoken English receives 100 pages or so, and is engagingly illustrated with examples from CANCODE. This is followed by 30 pages on the grammar of written academic English, with other forms of writing, such as internet English, receiving surprisingly little coverage. Subsequent chapters deal with the nuts and bolts of syntax: pronouns, modality, negation, and so on, all supported by data from the corpora. This leads to many valuable insights into, for example, the perennial problem of the differences between this and that in cases such as: Then, feeling rather foolish, he turned and hurried away down the drive. That was a hopeless beginning, he thought. According to Carter and McCarthy, that (as distinct from this) is used to refer to topics or assertions which are ‘of temporary interest but which are not major topics’ or to indicate that ‘the writer wishes to indicate a distance from the proposition’. Both explanations are succinct and convincing. After having read this entry, I tried to find it again in order to include the page number in this review, but found that it took me over five minutes to locate it again. (It was page 246 by the way, in a boxed entry entitled ‘It’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ referring to segments of text.) Yet a reference book really should be easier to navigate: the index has no fewer than 12 lines of entries for this and that, including Signalling with ‘it’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ (page 272), and ‘This’ and ‘that’ discourse segments (page 371), which means that it is rather difficult to look something up. Another reservation I have is the question of who the book is intended for, and its usefulness for that audience. The dustjacket spreads the net wide, describing the Cambridge Grammar of English as a ‘must-have for any serious learner or user of the English language’. The book’s metalanguage is certainly pitched at a higher level than, say, Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage. Carter and McCarthy say, in the section on Adjuncts on page 583: ‘However, for adjuncts of degree and for other adjuncts which modify the lexical verb rather than the whole clause, mid position is immediately before the lexical verb, following all modal and auxiliary verbs.’ While colour-coded examples are immediately called in to exemplify and clarify the point, one wonders if this really is a book teachers should recommend to any but the most proficient and jargonsavvy learner of English. The book seems to be pitched more at teachers and other language professionals. Despite the rather problematic and ungainly organisation of the Cambridge Grammar of English and its consequent limitations as a work of reference, it is highly readable. All in all, readers will find a wealth of thoroughly researched and well documented information in this book. Or should it be that book? Anthony Cosgrove London, UK Quick Smart English by Ken Wilson and Mary Tomalin Brookemead ELT 2006 Intermediate level SB + CD 1-905248-04-0 WB 1-905248-05-9 TB 1-905248-16-4 One of the first things you notice when you pick up a copy of Quick Smart English Intermediate Student’s Book is how thick the cover feels. This is because it has flaps front and back providing space for a very handy ‘Language bank’. This is a list of functional expressions divided into sections (Ways of asking for advice, Ways of comparing and contrasting, etc) which students can quickly refer to whenever they need to. These are particularly useful when students are doing speaking activities, and support for speaking is one of the major strengths of this book. The other skills are comprehensively covered, too, but it is the help which this course gives with speaking that is so impressive. Some of the topics are fairly controversial and the material won’t be suitable for all classes, but it is refreshing to find a coursebook tackling contemporary issues that young adult students really want to talk about, such as animal rights, drugs, war, obesity, hunting, the right to carry guns, and the price of celebrity. It also includes crosscurricular themes, such as science, economics and law. Plenty of opportunities are provided for students to react to the texts in the books and to formulate and express their own opinions. The course is intended as a rapid revision course for students at the Common European Framework B1–B2 level and should prove popular with students and teachers alike. An advanced level is also available for students at B2–C1 level. I haven’t used this yet, but it looks just as exciting as the intermediate level, if not more so! Louisa Judge Toulouse, France |
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