Customer Reviews

One Thousand Plus Pictures for Teachers to Copy (General Methodology)

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This is not "Art"! The ideas and materials in this book are not designed to develop your students artistic vision!

The pictures and techniques in this book are designed, rather, to be quick and effective ways to define words and phrases, illustrate dialogue, provide settings and context, motivate students, and provide references to which the learner can make a personal response.

The book begins with a clear and concise section on basic techniques. You will learn, quickly and painlessly, how to draw stickpeople and boxpeople, types of facial expression, caricatures, animals and objects, scenes, and special effects.

The bulk opf the book follows, consisting of more than a thousand pictures to copy, based on the Council of Europe "Threshold Level" and the "Cambridge English Lexicon". Included are pictures of settings (eg restaurant), personal identification (eg professions), topics and notions (eg health), vocabulary and grammar, and pictures for composition (speculative pictures and story sequences).

This is followed by a brief but useful section outlining some basic ways of using pictures in listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities.

The book is rounded off with a complete alphabetical index to the illustrated words.

If you teach ESL or need to communicate visually for some other reason, and you think you can't draw, find youself drawing elaborate, time-consuming pictures, or your drawing efforts often result in mass blank looks of incomprehension, this book is for you. If you are looking for a book which will turn you into an artist, it isn't.

The best book I've seen of it's type in nearly five years of full-time ESL teaching. Highly recommended if you fall within it's intended target audience.

I am a high school Spanish Teacher and tutor also. I came across this little gem of a book by accident.The pictures are clear and simple and they cover a variety of word categories (food, clothing, etc.) The pictures copy beautifully and are great for inserting into quizzes and tests for the visual learner. The story sequences are great and encourage students to talk without any written text in front of them. This is "TPR"
(Total Physical Response) before it was even officially labeled..
I have colleagues who use it for French and Italian too.

A complete artistic klutz, my classroom and handouts for my students have improved greatly since I discovered this great book. For language teachers and anyone who wants to learn some basic artwork, this book is a must-have.

This a veritable Bible for ESL/EFL teachers. Wright crams this excellent book with ideas that will help bring out the creative teacher and get everyone away from the often tedious textbook. The book is easy to use and can be browsed casually or worked through more systematically. I recommend the latter approach and suggest that ideas and activities can be used in all aspects of classroom work. A definite top 3 ELT books contender!

If you teach ESL, this book is essential. It puts every verb, noun, preposition, etc. in pictoral form, easy to draw and photocopy. It is good for upper levels all the way to special education. A special education professor at Columbia University told me she loved this book and would definitely use it.

I've taught English for several years, stateside and overseas and I have seen many books that are much better. Find a 10 year old to draw the pictures for you. They will come out looking better!

I stumbled upon this book in a University library and thought at first that it was a joke. It's books like these that rely on using symbols instead of observation, that confuse young students in learning how to draw. It takes me an entire semester in beginning college drawing classes to get students to forget the drawings they see in this book...the same type that their teachers use?

Actually, the how-to-draw-a-(whatever word)... is good comedy and I'm using the stupid little drawings as the basis of satire in my own artwork. Everything is wrong in this book: perspective is confused, stick figures look stupid and and the faces are simply bizarre.

Having said this, I do like the symbol sketches for such words as: "Sick"(p. 104) which shows a bent head with mouth open and what appears to be a shower spray (vomit) coming out of the mouth. I also like the illustration for "bleed," which is the profile of a face with some dark squiggly lines coming out of the nose.

The book even shows the future teacher how to combine these symbol drawings to create cartoon stories. This is where it gets even more bizarre. The story of Beauty and the Beast (?) (p. 116) is strangly erotic. In one sketch the beauty appears to be sitting on top of the beast with love (heart) on her mind. YIKES what is happening here?

I don't know whether to give this book one star or 5 stars. Guess it's how you look at it.