This is a book I discovered a couple of years ago. It’s very different in style from it’s competitors, whether intentionally or because it was published in 1997: spiral-bound, all black and white, no pictures. Furthermore, it doesn’t try any of that ‘humour’ that many books have.
So, it is a very functional book, and get’s straight down to business. It’s split into five sections, which are:
1.Focus on coherence
2.Focus on cohesion
3.Writing letters
4.Correcting written English
5.Punctuation
Each of the above are broken up into easily digestible pieces which are a series of exercises that double up as chapters that general have a paragraph of introduction and then dive straight into a task. Most of the sections begin with tasks that make you think about what you’re trying to achieve, rather than simply lexical/word-related tasks.
This is an interesting approach, and can be rather difficult to follow at times, as well as sometimes it being difficult to see the reason for some of the questions involved. I have been teaching for more than 12 years and am still unsure if the following are conjunctions or adverbs:
however, whatever, besides, consequently
and yet I am asked, at one point, to decide. My point is, does it matter?
To incorporate language learning into life, one needs to bring the target language, in this case English, out from the cold and into the warm front room of the everyday. Almost every client I have, whatever their level and situation, automatically disengages from English when they don’t have to use it (for most this means when not at work), and many are disengaged even when they are using it.
