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Textbook review
by Lorraine Ruston
Featured in www.easyenglishtimes.com.
Wow! Stories from Real Life: A Low-Beginning, Multi-Skills Text
by Natalie Hess and Laurel Pollard
Published by Alta Book Center
Most of us teach ESL because we like helping students. Here is a new book that will make our job even more enjoyable. Take a look at it and see if you don't say Wow! The true stories from real life set the scene for dozens of activities and exercises that give beginning students lots of meaningful and communicative practice.
The authors, Natalie Hess and Laurel Pollard, wrote the popular Zero Prep and Zero Prep for Beginners: Ready-to-Go Activities for the Language Classroom. As with those books, Wow! Stories from Real Life has many routines that help teachers make the most of the engaging activities and exercises.
Each lesson has a Progressive Cloze set of exercises that help students learn vocabulary, grammar, spelling and punctuation on their own. According to the authors, research shows that cloze is an excellent holistic exercise. (In the book they call these exercises Fill in the Blanks.)
In the introduction Hess and Pollard say, "Everyone loves a good story! Wow! unfolds heart-warming stories of reuniting families, of people in (and out of) love, and of unusual homes (see Living in the Library). Addressing personal themes encourages students to recall, talk and write about their own experiences. These stories really happened. They are all taken from the news or from personal experiences of students we know."
There are flexible exercises that allow students to work individually, in pairs, or in groups—and at their own levels. According to the authors, each of the 8 units offers a true story and a bundle of exercises proven to engage students for approximately 5 hours.
The book is suitable for adult and secondary students. In addition to many flexible exercises, there is a detailed step-by-step teacher guide, built-in assessment, and additional online resources, including an answer key.
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