Customer Reviews

Passages Workbook 1: An Upper-level Multi-skills Course

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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 in the 3rd unit. This goes for teachers and students too.

The syllabus is not very relevant. 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 the 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, say, grammar rules, is not given in the manual so you will have to search elsewhere.

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

I needed the book for my class and in just 3 days it was delivered in my house. Grat price, the best quality. I recomend it.