English Adventure review

My First English Adventure Starter
My First English Adventure 1
My First English Adventure 2
English Adventure Starter A
Mady Musiol and Magaly Villaroel
Longman

Maybe I have been in Japan and/ or working with small kids for too long, but when I heard there was a Disney-themed course for pre-school kids I got quite excited. When the excitement faded a little, I started to remember some of the other courses containing famous children’s characters and little else of academic interest that have been published over the years, and my heart started to sink. When the package finally arrived, it allayed all my fears almost as soon as I opened it. Inside the box was a plethora of the professional looking materials that have recently become the norm with Pre-school EFL materials, but with those famous characters used noticeably (but not excessively) throughout.

Mickey Mouse makes the first of many appearances to say ‘Hello’ at the beginning of My First English Adventure Starter, followed by Pooh washing himself to do body parts. Almost at the end of English Adventure Starter A (the highest level book I reviewed) we have Lilo and Stitch practising ‘Do you like?’. In between we have pretty much the full Disney cast, such as Jungle Book, Aristocats, Bambi and lots more Mickey and Pooh. In summary, the cuteness factor is high! The difficult part, however, is making sure all this fits into a syllabus and teaches children something. To achieve this each unit moves on from a suitable Disney picture to present the vocab (e.g. Pinocchio opening presents to present the vocab of toys), to more interactive activities in later pages such as ‘find, circle and say’, songs and crafts such as stickers to place on the page. All of these use a good, colourful and varied mix of Disney pictures and other drawings of teddy bears etc, with the occasional photo. The videos continue this format with a short clip of Disney cartoon being introduced, explained and expanded by a couple of typically overactive children’s TV presenters in each segment.

The teacher’s book is presented in a spiral bound ‘one page of the students’ book opposite one page of the teacher’s notes format’. The notes explain in some detail how to use the songs, flashcards, students’ book and activity book to full effect. This includes detailed explanations of the English incidental language teachers can use in the classroom to give instructions etc. to the students. There are several recurring elements in the books, such as the use of a cut out Mickey puppet to introduce and end the classes, and the classes all follow similar formats. The games are all also somewhat repeated over the units and will possibly be familiar to teachers already, meaning they are easy to use and guaranteed the work but will need supplementing sometimes. Some don’t really count as games at all, such as ‘listen and point’, but all are clearly explained. This dependable but slightly predictable pattern is repeated in the rest of the book- there are no original ideas here in how students learn and how we can help them, but the authors have put together a highly useable and professional looking package of what I would call ‘conventional practice’ materials that matches what us typical teachers do on an average day (in contrast to the more demanding sounding ‘best practice’ or ‘most up-to-date’ that inspired or inspiring teachers manage to do).

As with the original Disney cartoons, my favourite part of the course was the songs. In fact, some of the songs such as ‘Let’s Dance’ (practising stand up and sit down) sound like they could well have been included in the films around the Beauty and the Beast period. This means they are all very catchy and will get the children (and teachers) singing along in no time. The ones that got stuck in my head included ones about changing things into different colours by magic, knocking on the window to be let inside and banging on big and small drums. Whether the students understood what they are singing was not always so clear. Ones that were understood and interactive as well as catchy include ‘The Horse is Happy’ Others, such as ‘Come to a Picnic’, I found almost impossible to convey the meaning of or make interactive. I always use actions with songs at this age and the uses of the colour pictures in the books to make the meaning clear only worked with those of my classes who could actually concentrate on a page without being asked to colour on it. This brings me to the main problem I had with this material with some of my classes. Even with the best textbook and cutest characters in the world, in a country where some students start ‘studying’ English at 2 but don’t sit behind a desk to study even their own language until they are 6, anything that the course tries to add to the tried and trusted formula of flashcards, storybooks and action songs will inevitably be beyond some of the students in terms of mental development and concentration spans. I won’t, then, be using these books any longer down on the playmats between wiping noses. I will use a good number of the songs, though, with all my classes and I’m sure the video and posters will spice up a few more classes in the future too.

For a teacher who spends more time with the pre-school classes than me, for example a class teacher who is introducing English lessons for the first time either on their own or in conjunction with a specialist teacher, this course does the job as well as any good modern coursebooks do at any age or level. For me, though, the extra work involved in combining storybooks, crafts and songs yourself is still the best option at this age. If you do need to use a textbook though, this series certainly does the job with all the reduced preparation time, integration of materials etc. that good pre-published materials can give you.

Review originally published in Modern English Teacher magazine. Republished with permission.

(C) Alex Case/ Modern English Publishing