Headway Advanced mini review

Headway Advanced (old edition)
For me, advanced level textbooks remain a real weak point in the market, and although almost every course goes up to Advanced level nowadays there aren’t any real stand-out titles. This Headway book hasn’t been updated since the 80’s (and it shows in the illustrations), but it really doesn’t compare too badly to the competition. Certain bits of it, such as the Quentin Crisp listening and the use of cartoons and poetry, are inspired and will work with most classes. Other parts of the book concentrate a lot on understanding the culture and ideas in texts rather than the actual vocab and grammar, so this is more of a book for proficiency or post CAE level than post FCE. The topics are quite intellectually-challenging, and you’d have to be a bit of a ‘renaissance man’ to be interested in all of them, but certain classes respond well to this- especially those that don’t want to focus on the actual language at this level. Strangely, I’ve found that the two groups that like this book best are the seemingly diverse groups of intellectual teenagers and ‘older’ adults.