January 18, 2015

Review: New English File: Intermediate Student's Book


New English File: Intermediate Student's Book
New English File: Intermediate Student's Book by Clive Oxenden

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



As a language teacher I must say, this coursebook is good, but has some weaknesses. First of all, the speaking activities are quite underdeveloped. Usually, there are some questions that students should ask each other in pairs. My students feel totally bored by such activities. Hence, I had to invest a lot of time into developing games and other speaking exercises to each topic. Also, I don't know how the authors could possibly think that it would be possible to teach 30-40 words in a lesson. In my experience, one can teach approximately 10-12 words per lesson. The Vocabulary Bank is full of words and exercises, but they can't be used in the lesson, as we have no time for that. Hence, I always had to assign those exercises and learning the words as homework, which is sub-optimal. Also, it would have been nice, if there had been a downloadable Picture Bank with the pictures of the Vocabulary Bank for teachers, so that I could have used the pictures for making flashcards. Instead, I had to browse the internet for ages in order to find some suitable pictures. My students also disliked the Practical English lessons and the love story of Allie and Mark. They found the story stupid, predictable, and clichéd. I found them OK, but once again, there were usually no speaking activities focusing on the use/practice of the functions that these Practical English lessons were intended to teach. Now, there is a fully revised new edition of this book ([b:English File: Intermediate Student's Book with iTutor|23023858|English File Intermediate Student's Book with iTutor|Clive Oxenden|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1421576605s/23023858.jpg|42594304]) which hopefully doesn't repeat the mistakes of this edition. I'm looking forward to teaching from that.



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