Job Discussion Forums

[wangdaning]

[Non Sequitur]

My comment was clearly from an Oral English setting. Self study is an integral part of oral study but 3 or 4 sentence dialogues as per New Exchange are useless.
In a good dialogue each participating student should get 1 to 1.5 minutes of speech with a total time of say 4 minutes. The speaking should be more or less equal for all participants.
I like students doing dialogues to do so at the front of the class as I encourage actions to suit the words. If the dialogue requires an entrance then that character should start off outside the door. An introduction should involve actual shaking of hands.
I am surprised at how many students who can parrot 'How are you?' or 'I'd like you to meet Mr Chen' have no idea of how that would work in real life.
The dialogue should take longer to perform than the students getting to the front of the class.

[chryanvii]

I am glad to hear I am not alone in thinking that "Inside Out" is an absolutely useless book....even most of the topics are absolutely useless.

This semester I was left to my own devices to concoct my own materials. I'm used to it now...but boy was that a HUGE workload as to compared to my last semester at my old school, where most of the material in the book was useable, and something I could work with!

I tend to prefer those kind of books where you can take something and expand on it a little more.

[Miles Smiles]

My public college went from New Concepts English to some Chinese-published IELTS book when the students need a foundational text. It's all over their heads. I spent too much time explaining the instructions, so I pretty much ditched the book except for use as a guideline. I get all of my work from the internet. It's time consuming finding appropriate material, but it beats struggling with a text that nobody can understand. Worse, the answers are in the back of the book, so there's almost no incentive for the students to put forth effort.

[Kysorb]

Super Tots
Super Kids
Get Ahead
New Concept English
Cambridge Young Learners
Pandeng
New Interchange
Passages

Personally I like Super Tots/Kids the best followed by New Interchange. Both series have clearly thought out units and activities. I do find at least for me that I often am teaching New Interchange to public school audience that can not fully appreciate the topics because they are too young, but that is not the books fault.

I don't like Cambridge Young Learners because it has a broad scope with limited application and direction. Pandeng is a public school program done with Chinese kids. the songs and activities start out ok but they degrade as the units go on. The songs are also sung by young Chinese kids and there is typically at least 1 poorly pronounced word per song because of it.

[Dinah606]

I've used Super Kids and Chatterbox for primary school kids, and my school also uses English Zone to teach grade five and six students. For kindergarten I used Experience English, and for middle school I use English in Mind.

I really love Chatterbox for grade one to four students. The grammar points are arranged in a logical way and the lessons are quite easy to teach. It also has an ongoing fantasy/sci-fi/detective story which has an episode for each unit, and the students love this. The characters and the plot-lines make for a lot of running jokes in the class, and plenty of things to talk about. My only problem with it is that it's sort of outdated (the kids in it listen to records rather than MP3s or even CDs!) and some of the vocabulary is sort of weird (grade two students sing a song about the diplodocus dinosaur and read a text called "The Smugglers".). I've read online that the series *has* been updated recently, but we still use the same old version.