Customer Reviews

Passages Workbook 2: An Upper-level Multi-skills Course

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I have been using Passages in an English As A Second Language class in Guatemala for about four months and have found it to be a valuable and interesting resource. My students are all native Spanish speakers and I have seen their interest in the material and an improvement in their skills. The series is made up of a student's book, workbook and a teacher's book. All three of these books are well integrated and the teacher's book is written so well that any reasonably educated native English speaker can utilize it to instruct non-native speakers. The grammar points are well selected and relate to the material used to introduce and practice them. I even find the subject matter personally interesting and find that it stimulates conversation in the classroom.

My ESL class (Intermediate-Advanced level) really enjoys this book and the topics covered. A good mix of conversation pieces, reading and writing. I wish Amazon offered the Teacher's Edition of this book !

THE FOLLOWING IS THE REVIEW I WROTE FOR THE FIRST BOOK IN THIS SERIES. THE SAME PROVES TO BE TRUE FOR THIS BOOK, SO WHY WRITE A DIFFERENT REVIEW?

After having used this course for a number of years now I can say that it is shallow and repetitive. Why? The topics are not well developed. Not even do they provide useful core vocabulary for students to make full use of them in their speaking activities. As it were not enough, the activities on each and every topic of all units - with no exception - are boring because the way they were devised is basically the same for every unit, which makes the book unbearable by the time you are 3rd unit. This goes for teachers and students too.

Notwithstanding, the grammar focuses in most of the units are of little importance when compared to what intermediate students really need. Not only that: very few examples (the book is very poor when it comes to giving examples) are given in the grammar focus exercises, as if the students were supposed to grasp the teaching points instantly. REPETITIVE AGAIN.

The listening activities rarely show any variation as to the kind of tasks the students are supposed to do. Also, the listening passages sound like they are being read from a script - very probably read from a script - and do not give a 'real feel' of spoken language.

When it comes to interactive speaking tasks, there is always the same question in the rubrics: Which ... is the most surprising/most creative/most bla-bla-bla...? REPETITIVE....

Then there are the reviews after every three units. The same topics seen in the units prior to the review are revisited, I mean repeated, but not with a different approach. Also, the same grammar points are seen IN THE SAME TOPICS again. For example, defining and non-defining relative clauses are dealt with in the topic of cities; this will happen again in the reviews. Who says that these two kinds of clauses are only used to talk about cities? A very good opportunity to devise exercises in which to practice the teaching points in a different light was lost. YET REPETITIVE AGAIN.

However, I have to admit that there are some interesting activities suggested in the teacher's manual, but those were unfortunately not planned as an integral part of the course, so you end up not doing many of them because of your allotted time for lessons in your schedule.

Another negative facet of the teacher's manual is that when there really is something that is tricky, especially grammar points, the explanation to what you want is not given so you will have to search for, say, grammar rules, elsewhere.

If you are considering using this as your course book, think twice, three times, four times...

<Passages> is used as a text book in my foriegn language conversation class. This book has all-colored paper, so it is pretty expensive, I think. The construction of it is satisfiable. It holds lots of pictures, and I feel more comfortable rather than the book which has only words. But I can't ignore that <Passages> has boring parts. So, I say that this book is not perfect. <Passages> gives me some help to study English about pronouncing, etc.