Customer Reviews

New Interchange Student's audio cassette 2B: English for International Communication

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I teach English in South America, and our students achieve a basic mastery of English from working in their classes, in a multi-media laboratory, and in the three volumes of the New Interchange series. Those who pass through all sixteen levels of classes -- corresponding to three or four units of New Interchange -- master basic English in a little over a year. I am amazed everyday by the reflection of the New Interchange in my students' abilities. The NI program's organization has students ready for rudimentary social conversation in only a week or so, and by the time they reach the end of the series they can talk about most any quotidian thing and many abstractions fluently.

Despite its proven finesse as a text, the series sometimes cries out for deconstruction, which is itself instructive to my students. The music on the accompanying tapes seems cheesy and repetitive, the characters in the conversation unrealistically squeaky (of the Donna Reed / Beaver Cleaver variety), and the text seems annoyingly politically correct on one hand and, on the other, particularly ethno- and geocentric in that peculiarly North American manner. It seems a little strange explaining in South America what a "tan" is or why college-aged youth are in such a hurry to leave their parents' home. It's as if the book assumes every college graduate secures his own apartment with his first paycheck and spends all his weekends at the beach.

Yet it is clear that the book works well and presents concepts from the foundation upward so that students master English conceptually rapidly and well. I recommend the New Interchange series as a textual foundation for any extended (a year or more) program in English.