TEFL Book Reviews
Reviews of books (and occasionally other resources such as software and games) of special interest to English teachers, edited by Alex Case. New reviews are added regularly. If you would like to review books for TEFL.net, please read this.
 Talking Trinity (Elementary Stage) Talking Trinity Elementary, written by Jeremy Walenn and published by Garnet Education, prepares young learners for Grades 4-6 of the Trinity GESE exams. It seems aimed at students aged between 9 and their early teens and is designed to be used in a classroom environment. The book covers both the topic and general conversation sections of the exam.
With eight lessons per grade, the book takes a thematic approach to the exam with topics taken from the conversation topic areas as laid out in the Trinity syllabus. One of the best things about Talking Trinity is the focus on pairwork, which allows for lots of personalisation and exam-style practice, and maximises student talking time. In addition to this, Walenn uses listening, gap fill and matching tasks to draw out the grammar and vocab of each grade in an engaging and fun way. Each lesson ends with a summary of the language aims and possible questions for the general conversation part
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 Direct to TOEFL iBT As the title makes clear, this book aims to prepare learners for the computer-based TOEFL iBT test. It is organized in six sections. The introduction orients the student to the project of preparing for the TOEFL iBT and addresses general format characteristics of the exam and skills that will be useful throughout all the exam sections. Following that, are sections corresponding to each of the four parts of the test: reading, listening, speaking and writing. Each section contains practice test items, and the final section is a complete practice test. The website provides sound files for the listening tasks, audio scripts of the sound files, an answer key, and three more practice tests that can be taken like an actual TOEFL test or with more student control over the format in “practice mode”. A particularly nice feature is the “My Exams” page, where the student can review the exams they have taken. The code given with each book provides site access for one user for 18 months.
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 Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-Intermediate Professional skills require specific language knowledge and it’s essential that students can express themselves clearly and unambiguously in their working lives. I can imagine few situations where it’s more important to have a firm grasp of the language than in medical contexts.
Cambridge English for Nursing is a book aimed at Pre-Intermediate level communicators. The book is carefully structured so that there is a focus on vocabulary acquisition, key expressions and terminology. There are also audio texts to practise recognising and responding to situations. There are no specific grammar reviews in the book itself, simply a focus on functional and communicative language. I particularly liked seeing development of the expressions which enable a sensitive approach, as is essential for this caring profession.
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 English for Psychology When Garnet Education’s ‘English for Specific Academic Purposes’ series won the English Speaking Union’s English Language book award in 2009, it was an indication that the provision of quality resources for EAP had entered a new era. Having seen how Garnet Education have raised the bar in terms of ESP course books, I approached the Psychology volume with high hopes. Once again, they have delivered the goods.
The series, to which English for Psychology is a new addition, is a collection of skills-based courses designed specifically for non-native students who are about to enter English-medium tertiary-level studies. One of the major gripes that teachers have with course books is that they rarely fit the context in which they are being used. Garnet have firmly broken the mould with the series in general and with English for Psychology in particular. By aiming for a small target audience – this book is specifically for university students and not the psychology profession in general – the author has delivered a course book that will provide a strong foundation in the language of the field.
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 A Handbook of Spoken Grammar This book, with audio CD, can be used either for self-study, or in class to supplement other material. It focuses on an aspect of language that is often neglected in course books: spoken grammar. According to the authors, it “teaches learners to speak more naturally, using the patterns that native speakers use when speaking English”. The authors relied on corpus data and recent research into spoken English to select the elements for study, which are presented in 20 units, from the simplest to the most complex. I was interested to see how well it measured up to its claims.
Each unit is a stand-alone section, with two double page spreads. The first two pages present the elements for study, with clear explanations of the focus, the reasons for use and the most frequent contexts in which the language will be found.
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 Flightpath ATC, ATCOs, ETOPS, METAR, TAF, ATIS, ALAR, ILS and VOR DME all sound like something we would be writing in a text message or internet lingo. In actual fact they are all aviation acronyms and can be found in Cambridge’s new Aviation English textbook, Flightpath, by Philip Shawcross. Flightpath is a course for students who are pilots and ATCOs (Air Traffic Control Officers) who need an International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) level 4 qualification. Shawcross has been working in Aviation English for almost 40 years, so he knows his stuff. To add to the authenticity of this textbook, it was reviewed by a panel of aviation experts.
While the topics are a little daunting at first, when you look through the detailed contents page of this textbook you can quickly see that it is really well laid out and easy to use. The text itself is divided into four parts with a total of 10 units, and each unit is divided into Operational topics, Communication topics and Language content. The contents
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 Materials Development in Language Teaching In 1998 I was giving teacher training courses in Bosnia. In those past and almost forgotten days, the whole country was trying to recuperate from a long and bloody war. So in one of my sessions, I came across a teacher who had no books and students who could hardly attend classes. I still remember her telling me the huge amount of materials she had made herself and asking for old-fashioned books that could be sent over there. This is very much the situation of many teachers across the world who rely on their own efforts to create materials. It could be because they are in countries where teaching materials are hard to get or just because the teaching materials do not fulfill their needs, as happens with many ESP teachers. In short, finding the appropriate teaching materials changes dramatically depending on a number of factors, and in not few occasions teachers need to create their own specific ones. This updated version of the classic title Materials Development in Language Teaching is aimed at all those kinds of people.
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 Talking Trinity Initial Talking Trinity Initial by Jeremy Walenn is the first in a series of books published by Garnet Education and aimed at preparing learners for the Trinity General English Speaking exam. The book is designed to be used with young learners in a classroom environment and would be most suitable for children under the age of 12. . An audio CD is also provided to support the materials given. This publication focuses on the Initial stage of the exams, which is divided into grades 1, 2 and 3 and, as indicated on the back cover of the book, is comparable to CEF A1-A2.
There are twenty-four lessons in the book, eight lessons per grade, each tackling a different grammatical or lexical requirement. Depending on the length of lesson, these may need some padding or alternative resources, but the teacher’s book has good suggestions for extending activities
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 Grammar One (part of the Oxford "Grammar" series for children) The Grammar series of student books from Oxford neatly deals with the thorny issue of how to teach grammar to young learners in a communicative way. The series can be used as class books to prepare for the Cambridge ESOL Young Learners English Tests or as supplemental material to illustrate a specific grammar point. It all begins with Grammar Starter and Grammar One, which correspond with the Starter exam and then towards Movers. Grammar Two prepares young learners for the Movers tests and on towards Flyers. Finally the last of the series is Grammar Three, which works on the Flyers test and beyond. So you can use these as the main exam preparation book for your young learner classes for many different levels and grades.
Each book covers around twenty distinct grammar items that relate to the appropriate Cambridge exam. The item is presented in a short text or written dialogue to illustrate the meaning. The grammar explanation is on
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 Engaging Writing Engaging Writing: Essential Skills for Academic Writing 1 and 2 are designed to teach academic writing skills, with the two texts comprising a total of eleven thematic chapters. Topics range from level one’s accomplishments, occupations, and growing up in different cultures to level two’s units on role models, culture, identity, and homeland, and marriage and family. The textbook is designed for students of American English who have attained an intermediate (level one) to high intermediate or low advanced (level two) proficiency level.
Engaging Writing 1 contains six chapters, each of which begins with a reading and is followed by sections on the writing process and revising. The text does a fine job of preparing students for the respective reading passages
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 Digital Play Digital Play, written by Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley, is the latest in Delta Publishing’s Teacher Development Series, an impressive strand that includes Nickly Hockly and Lindsay Clandfield’s guide to Teaching Online and Scott Thornbury and Luke Medding’s seminal Teaching Unplugged. This book concentrates on the use of computer games in language teaching.
The book is divided into three sections. The first looks at the wider place that video games occupy in society, how they are currently used in education and how they can be used with language learners. The second part includes a variety of activities, concentrating on all four language skills and the full spectrum of technical scenarios. The final part highlights the ways that video games can be incorporated into a syllabus and offers suggestions for how they help teachers to develop.
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 Learning Teaching The title of this book is encouraging because it suggests that you can learn how to teach. It also suggests that it is an ongoing process. Jim Scrivener is a very reassuring writer, and an experienced teacher, with many excellent ideas about teaching and his style is very readable and unthreatening for the novice or student teacher. The bonus with the third edition is a DVD showing many of the techniques and strategies described in the book. The drawback of the DVD is that all the classes are filmed at a private language school in Cambridge, with very small groups. It would have been far better (but undoubtedly much more complicated and expensive) to have filmed many different classroom types, varying the level, age, size, sector, etc. However, even though all the classes are on the same model, it is still very useful to see exactly how certain strategies can be used in the classroom.
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 English for the Australian Curriculum Book 1 English for the Australian Curriculum (Book 1) is a new textbook aimed at teaching English and literacy in an Australian context for junior secondary (Junior High School), but I decided to try it in two of my university EFL classes in Japan where students were in their 3rd and 4th year of English study.
At first glance it is very colorful and glossy and its layout is well constructed and easy to navigate, although it is a little big and heavy to carry. The text begins with an informative Contents page, followed by a Foreword from the editors, information about the authors and also advice on how to use the book. The textbook itself is divided into 7 chapters which are color-coded, making it easy to access. Their titles are My Story Our Stories, Poetry Activated, Getting Animated: Genre and Narrative in Animated Films, Ghosts, Ghouls and Doppelgangers: Exploring Gothic Horror Stories, Fairytales Revamped, Meanwhile Somewhere Else: Three Films from Iran, and Dream On: Storytelling, Reality and Identity.
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 Listening Power 2 Listening Power 2 with its accompanying four CDs is the second in a series of books that have a targeted approach to the listening skills that students need for standardized tests such as TOEFL and TOEIC. The lessons are practical for both inside and outside the classroom. The book is presented in four parts: Language Focus, Comprehension Focus, Note-taking Skills and Listening for Pleasure. Students are meant to work through the four sections at the same time as each other.
The Language Focus section teaches language such as questions, numbers, reduced forms, homonyms and sentence stress that are essential for listening comprehension but sometimes difficult to understand. One example of this is the unit about understanding numbers where it is pointed out that we use numbers in a wide variety of ways such as talking about prices, phone numbers,
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 Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners Teaching spelling has long been deemed a daunting task by ESL instructors. Frequently considered a chore at best, the presentation of orthographic rules and patterns is often sidestepped in the wake of more important class-time affairs. Johanna Stirling aims to shed light on the importance, and perhaps, ease of spelling instruction in Teaching Spelling to English Language Learners.
The text is written for teachers of adult English Language Learners, although the author points out that teachers of young learners and native English speakers would also benefit from the presented methodologies. Divided into sections, this guide deals with the problems associated with teaching spelling, and offers solutions to those problems through pedagogically focused activities.
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 IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills Writing is undeniably challenging and an area in which many students struggle to achieve a good exam score. Given that the IELTS Academic exam has two quite different writing tasks, practice is essential. Knowing and understanding what is needed to achieve a good mark is really useful, and in this book the authors, both IELTS writing examiners, clearly guide the reader through the different sections, practising key skills and building a range of expressions.
One great feature of the book is the “Try It First” sections. People using the book are encouraged to write an essay before studying the unit, in order to gauge how much they already know and what they need to work on. This should be effective in motivating them, and shows them the worth of the book by giving them the knowledge to fill the gaps identified. The book could be used as a self-study book or as a class course book.
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 Delta Academic Objectives: Reading Skills Reading Skills by Louis Rogers is a new title from Delta Publishing which forms part of the Delta Academic Objectives series to help students adapt to the challenges of studying academic English. The book prepares the learners to work with difficult academic material by covering the following four areas: understanding and comprehension of the text, critical thinking, using the text, and language focus. This text matches learners who have a lower reading proficiency, and it would best fit a target audience of middle school level and higher. It best fits students’ needs in basic areas of reading comprehension, specifically when it is related to reading of academic English texts.
The structure of the text includes 12 units, with units six and 12 dedicated to revision of the previous material. At the end of the book there is an Academic Word List, comprising twelve pages of exercises that test vocabulary knowledge. The individual chapters start out with “aims” that serve as objectives for each unit. A Topic Focus section prepares students for the material in the chapter. This is followed by a section entitled Understanding the Text which identifies specific reading skills such as
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 English in Mind English in Mind (Second Edition) is a course that the publishers claim is fresh and inspiring, especially designed to motivate teenagers, with 100% up-to-date content and extra attention on developing fluency. It has a Student’s Book DVD-ROM that contain games, extra exercises and video dramas featuring the photostory characters. The photostories also have a “videoke” function for students to record themselves taking part in the dialogue.
The books are level 3 which is B1 council of Europe level. They are standard A4 in size with a purple jacket. Inside, the student book is divided into 14 sections, with each one covering a different aspect of grammar, based around different topics. The first section is a recap of tenses previously
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 Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics by Diane Larsen-Freeman and Lynne Cameron forms part of the Oxford Applied Linguistics series. However, you don’t need a great deal of prior knowledge of Applied Linguistics to read this book, as the main focus is on the complex systems part of the title. For that reason, it may be that some background in science would be helpful. Alternatively, a scientific background may have you throwing this book against the wall, for reasons explained below.
Complexity theory tells us that the behaviour of certain systems, known as “complex systems”, cannot be predicted because unmeasurably tiny changes now lead to completely different results later. This concept is best grasped using an analogy with a pile of sand. If you keep adding grains of sand to the pile, an avalanche is sure to happen, but it’s impossible to predict when, and in which direction, and how much sand will fall. All we can do is look back, and offer a retrospective account of what happened: the pile collapsed after adding such-and-such a grain, and fell in such-and-such a way, something that doesn’t allow us to predict similar events in the future because that “…depends on the day of the week… the time of day…” and a thousand other interconnected and uncontrollable factors (p235). It doesn’t take much scientific knowledge to realise that this runs contrary to the conventional picture of science that most of us learnt at school, with its regularly moving pendulums and models of the solar system. Complexity theory has been heralded by some as a paradigm shift, one that could revolutionise areas outside the natural sciences like economics, education and business. However, others believe that when it is exported to those other areas it usually becomes pseudo-science at best (hence the potential for angry scientists).
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 Primary iDictionary 2 The Primary iDictionary 2 is an interactive picture dictionary CD-ROM published by Cambridge. It is designed for primary school aged learners of English with the vocabulary being suitable for children preparing for the Cambridge Movers exam.
The program contains over 300 words divided into 14 vocabulary topics ranging from animals to weather, as well as language-focused units on things like adjectives and past simple forms. In each topic, the vocabulary is presented via images with the accompanying word. The pronunciation of each word can also be listened to, as can the spelling of the word.
Each unit also contains a song, a story and a game, all of which draw on the vocabulary that is presented. The songs can be listened to with the lyrics or without, or in the ‘karaoke’ mode that allows the child to sing along. There are 4 different types of game: a drag and drop game in which words are matched to pictures; a drag and drop game in which items are added to a picture based on an audio description; a listen and match game in which a description of an item or action is listened to before choosing the corresponding image; and a memory card game in which matching pairs of cards need to be found.
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