Natural English Int and Upper Review

Natural English Review
OUP
Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman

Intermediate Student’s Book
Intermediate Teacher’s Book
Intermediate Workbook- Lyn Scott and David Scott
Intermediate Puzzle Book- Ruth Gairns

Upper Intermediate Student’s Book
Upper Intermediate Teacher’s Book
Upper Intermediate Workbook- Lyn Scott and David Scott
Upper Intermediate Puzzle Book- Ruth Gairns

Review by Alex Case

The authors of these two levels of textbook have finally found an answer to the conundrum of things that get left out of courses because nobody knows if they should be done as grammar, vocabulary, functions or whatever. Their simple solution is to create another category, ‘Natural English’, to include sentence stems, functional language and anything else that wouldn’t ‘fit’ on a normal textbook syllabus page. The process that inspired the authors to make this little revolution was also so simple that it is difficult to believe that no-one had ever tried it before. They gave speaking tasks to Intermediate, Upper Intermediate and Advanced students and noted down the language that the higher students used and the others didn’t. They therefore came up with a list of points to cover to get the lower level students up to the same level as the higher ones. Et voila, a course that looks and feels different from any other around at the moment.

Each unit of the books opens with either a joke or a cartoon. It continues with listening and reading sections, mixed up with vocabulary and grammar sections. There is further vocabulary practice in the ‘wordbooster’ sections. Scattered throughout the unit, there are clearly-marked ‘Natural English’ boxes (with titles like ‘Asking for help’ and ‘What on earth…?’) and boxes marked ‘Extended speaking- learn these phrases for later’ (with phrases such as ‘I like rock and that sort of thing’ in Int and ‘We’ve made up a slogan’ in Upper). Each unit finishes with a page or so of ‘How to…’, covering things like conversational strategies, and finally a 2 or 3 page ‘Extended speaking task’ that is designed to tie together all the language from the whole unit.

The jokes that start alternate chapters are guaranteed to make all the students laugh- which is a good start! All the jokes have lots of colourful pictures and lead-in questions to give context, and this means they are well enough set up that all the students get the punch line on the first or second listening. The cartoons that start the other units are given in full on both the page and the CD, but are more difficult to use in class. In both levels, they are all based on episodes of the life of a teenage girl called Agrippine and (like all cartoons) only really make certain people laugh. This means that, unlike the jokes, there is no way of knowing instantly whether the students have understood. Perhaps to make the cartoons appear more fun, no tasks such as prediction tasks or comprehension questions are provided. Some creativity is therefore needed to stop them becoming repetitive by the end of the book.

The language in the jokes and cartoons is explored in the first ‘Natural English’ boxes of each unit, as well as a glossary. As these are real-life sources of language, more idiomatic language is included than is generally the case at these levels (e.g. ‘What on earth…?’ at Upper Intermediate level and ‘give me a hand’ at Int). The Natural English boxes also appear throughout the rest of the unit, dealing with points such as ‘take’ for lengths of time (Int) and ‘whenever/ wherever’ (Upper) taken from and expanding on language found in the reading and listening texts. I think many of the points covered in these boxes are things that have genuinely been missing from courses, such as ‘the bigger the better’, but I am not entirely convinced that the fact that advanced students can use ‘It appeals to me’ means that it must be covered in an Upper Intermediate book. For one thing, the Advanced students they used to research these points must have picked up some of these points without studying them, as they are not covered in traditional courses.

The best thing about the books is the listening and reading texts. Topics include the powers of photomontage (Int) and film-making gaffs (Upper). Teachers and students responded particularly well to the fact that the listenings usually had a short lead-in section before the main text. Other task types include lots of good prediction tasks and lots of note-taking practice. An unusual extra is the ‘listening booklet’ tucked into the back cover of the student’s book. It provides not only the tapescripts to the listening texts, but optional exercises on points such as analysis of the pronunciation and phrases used in the texts.

The grammar syllabi cover most of the points that are usually covered at these levels, but the order in which they covered is sometimes unusual (e.g. future continuous before narrative tenses) and extra coverage is given to some points (e.g. modals) that the authors found students at these levels were particularly lacking. The vocabulary exercises take one aspect of the topic of the unit and extends on it, for example collocations with ‘use’, ‘do’, ‘have’ etc. for a text on keeping yourself busy in traffic jams (in Int) and ‘describing character’ after a text on prison letters (Upper). These sections are generally small, but suffer somewhat from having much more written than oral practice (sometimes no oral practice) .This is also true of the grammar sections, and even more true of the wordbooster sections (which deal with vocab matters like suffixes in more details). There are also none of the usual pairwork activities prompts- either in the teachers’ books or at the back of the student’s books. All of this means you either have to supplement the book a lot or find another way of using the exercises (see below).

The Extended Speaking tasks are very strongly influenced by Task-based Learning, and have all the factors you would expect from this- giving the students preparation time, texts to give ideas and models for the task, and chances to repeat similar tasks in different ways. There is also a chance for students to mark themselves on how they did the task. The tasks tie the language covered in the unit together very well, but unfortunately the actual topics are less than inspiring- such as ‘men and women’ and ‘visitors to your country’ (Int) or ‘animals in society’ and ‘radio news report’ (Upper).

As the number of paragraphs above might hint at, there has been no reduction in the grammar and vocabulary points covered in order to make way for the new ‘Natural English’ points. On top of this, it is not often obvious what to do with the little boxes of useful language apart from draw students’ attention to them, and there is the lack of traditional oral ‘controlled practice’ mentioned above. Assuming you want to cover all of the useful points the book makes available to you, there is obviously a need to teach in a different way from other textbooks. The teachers’ books are excellent, with lots of ideas on how to use each unit and whole 2 or 3 page chapters of useful teaching tips on points such as ‘How to…monitor and give feedback’ (Int) and ‘How to… develop lexis at higher levels’ (Upper). Although many of the individual ideas in the teachers’ books are original, they still do not really present a new way of teaching. After some difficulties trying to adapt the materials to my usual teaching style, I did finally find a workable way of exploiting the (interesting and relevant) material in it. I found the best way was to go in to class having only decided what text to base my class around (for example, the reading text about problems ordering things in hotels), and to choose from the accompanying grammar, vocabulary and ‘natural English’ points as they came up in classroom discussion and student questions about the language presented in it. For example, with the text mentioned above students actually asked me questions about the ‘asking for repetition’ language that was in the Natural English box (which we naturally turned to to help me explain it). When they discussed the text they also used ‘giving opinions’ language and this lead on (again, naturally) to the wordbooster on the next page. This meant that I could show the relevance of the exercises without the need to add too much in terms of a game element- although I still needed to improvise some spoken practice for the various parts of the lesson. My teenage classes responded particularly well to this natural teaching method, as they seemed to ‘rebel’ against any fixed plan I had coming into the class anyway.

Each of the books has an accompanying workbook and puzzle book. The workbook is fairly conventional, although there is more colour and pictures than is usual. It practices all the language in the Student’s book and expands on the vocabulary and grammar. It does not cover writing at all, which is an area that is rather neglected by the series- when there is writing tasks in the student’s book, models are very rarely provided. The puzzle book serves a similar purpose to the workbook, but there has obviously been a lot of effort put in to show that ‘self-study is fun’, with the use of jokes, poems, cartoons, word games, trivia etc. The presentation of all this means that it is not really suitable for adults, and indeed the course as a whole looks as if it was designed very much with teenagers in mind in terms of the topics and language chosen. However, the puzzle book was the only part of the course which I felt was not suitable for a class with more mature students. The appearance of all the books, with big patches of colour and a great variety of pictures, should also appeal to all ages.

I would recommend this book for teachers who have always wanted to try the ‘take in a can of coke or a couple of headlines and see what happens’ school of teaching, but were too scared to or were not convinced they could do it without running out to the photocopier to get a ‘good activity on just that point’ halfway through the class. The books provide interesting texts that that invariably throw up genuine language questions from the students, which can be dealt with by using the (very adaptable) controlled practice exercises while you are thinking of an inspired speaking activity to round it all off. The extra work needed to read through the teacher’s book and adapt the materials to your class is well worth the effort. Due to the fact that it covers points that are often missed out at these levels, both levels are especially suitable for students spending a second year at the same level.

Review originally published in Modern English Teacher magazine. Republished with permission.
(C) Alex Case/ Modern English Publishing