Skills in English: Level 3 Writing Course Book
Terry Phillips
Garnet Education 2004
2005 reprintISBN: 1-85964-7936
Teacher's Book ISBN: 1-85964-7979
Test Packet ISBN: 1-85964-7618
Part of Garnet's systematic Skills in English Course with shared topics, Level 3 Writing aims at helping intermediate to upperintermediate learners of English improve their writing and their scores on skill-based exams like IELTS or TOEFL.
Increasing vocabulary is emphasized at the beginning of each unit where known ‘red' words are revised and new ‘green' words are introduced in gapped texts. In addition, at the end of the book the glossary is repeated by unit and alphabetically. Including a variety of exercises, such as crosswords, puzzles, odd one out, gap fill, 2-column activities, ordering, explaining visuals and error correction, helps learners master new vocabulary.
Although it is not based on a grammar syllabus, grammar underlies its entire framework, whereby the emphasis is on present tense, word order and sentence patterns. The teaching method, based on recent research in English for Academic Purposes, revolves around noticing new skills, then practicing, revising and organizing them. Each unit has four logically sequenced lessons: vocabulary, writing, learning new skills, and applying new skills. Each unit culminates in two writing tasks.
Level 3 focuses on the following writing skills: concluding opinions, writing about famous people, using passives to describe a process, joining sentences with conjunctions, prepositions, participles and relative pronouns, using demonstratives for textural reference, talking about obligation in the past and describing charts and graphs. Other writing skills are practiced on the other levels. The Teacher's Book furnishes the answers, detailed teaching notes on methodology, language and culture as well as tips on how to exploit the activities. Test Booklets, sold in packs of ten, supply answers and guidelines, a revision after unit five and a final exam. Proof of purchase permits access to the website with an alternative final exam.
What I like about this book is the coordination between the input and output texts. Input texts, such as articles, essays, rules and examples, tables, diagrams, graphs and charts, help learners produce advisory texts, descriptions, factual articles and essays. The topics selected for the writing assignments, such as learning experiences and learning styles, heredity and environment, recruiting and dismissing people, how to heat or cool a room efficiently, an extraction industry, a civilization, a modern household appliance, a novel or novelist, tourism, disabilities and access to education, are personalized by asking learners to write about them in their own country. For instance, unit 9 on tourism encompasses an input text about Singapore together with a line graph, a pie chart and a bar graph to teach learners how to explain and evaluate trends and statistics in papers precisely and fluently while the ‘skills checks' supply useful phrases for describing such visuals.
In spite of the fact that this series provides material for tailor-making preparatory courses for learners of English, working through the material with a class looks very time-consuming. Correcting twenty papers per person per course would be tedious. Furthermore, choosing the right level might be tricky. A teacher would probably have to work through a number of levels to improve learners' writing skills enough to enable them to write precisely, coherently and cohesively. However, students who need to improve their ability to write assignments, exams and term papers on a tertiary level could certainly benefit from using this Level 3 Writing Skills Course Book. In 2004 this series won the ‘Highly Commended' English Language Award from the Duke of Edinburgh's English- Speaking Union.
Margret Rohmeder