New Headway Academic Skills Level 2 Teacher's Book 49
Numbers Ventors
Headway Academic Skills can be used alongside your coursebook or on it's own. The series improves students' academic skills by:Developing the specific skills required for academic reading, writing, listening and speaking through a wide range of serious topics and tasks relevant to Higher Education.Exploring strategies to help students with academic vocabulary, including recording and building their vocabulary.Offering guidance with academic research tasks, such as acknowledging sources.Providing freer tasks that encourage learner independence.Supporting and encouraging additional guided practice with new photocopiable worksheets in the Teacher's Guides.
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BEBC are Britain's oldest specialist bookseller of English Language Teaching materials. Now in it's 50th year, BEBC opened to service the needs of local language schools, and quickly established a reputation for speed, service and stockholding. We are now known locally, nationally and internationally, and we are proud of our reputation for holding both the titles and the level of stock necessary to meet the needs of our customers. Our core values that started the company still run throughout: a focus on personal customer service that promises to deliver quickly and efficiently at competitive prices.
Intended Audience According to the book summary, Headway Academic Skills 3 functions as a bridge between general and academic English, and can be used either independently or alongside a general English course. While it does not specify the proficiency level of students, the book will be helpful to both native speakers, as well as advanced ESL students who have just begun university.
Apart from its main weakness of not providing integrated and appropriate opportunities for students to fully develop academic skills, the book also features topics which may be too impersonal for young adults to identify with. While the topics represent diverse cultures and are appropriate for a higher education audience, the approach taken does not lead students to be personally interested in the material. Activities revolve around the given reading passages or writing tasks with few opportunities for students to provide their viewpoints or creatively interact with the material provided. This lack of personal interaction is reinforced by the largely similar nature of the tasks such as underlining words and phrases, filling in gaps and matching items with corresponding answers.
Despite its instructional flaws, Headway Academic Skills 3 has several strengths. One of them is the use of near authentic materials such as journal articles, news reports and letter to capture the range of expository writing material a university student would likely to be exposed to. Even though some of the materials were probably re-written with a more appropriate level of grammar and vocabulary, it is more important for the materials to be more easily understood while simulating authenticity than for materials to be presented in its original but less comprehensible form, especially for students who struggle with such texts (Flowerdew & Peacock, 2001, p. 185).
Another strength is that the book can be adapted for use with either native English speakers or ESL students. While ESL students would probably appreciate the straightforward and simplified language used, all students will find it beneficial to learn specific reading and writing strategies. For first language students, teachers can consider using more challenging supplementary reading material for students to practice their academic skills.
Finally, Headway Academic Skills 3 does well in having visually appealing graphics and layout. For example, most of the photos used are clear, colorful and informative. In terms of the layout, the different sections are color-coded for easy reference. In addition, important information like study skills and language rules are highlighted in boxes and placed at the side so as not to interrupt the flow of the text. However, one minor complaint I have about the layout is that there is hardly any white space on each page and the limited spacing between tasks and sections. Thus the reader will find it difficult to focus on the text at first glance.
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