Product Description

This is a communicative conversation activity book for ESL teachers and students. Ideal for guided conversational pair and group work. Engaging, practical, personal, experiential questions and topics to improve spoken grammar skills. Q & A, information seeking, conversational bingo and listening & speaking activities about TV shows and movies make this an excellent addition to liven up any communicative English course, basic to advanced levels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3804751 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-01
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 152 pages

Review
Practical, provocative, and fun, August 10, 2005 As an ESL instructor who has taught conversation classes in several programs and often felt frustrated with superficial textbooks, "Conversation Pieces" stands out for its practical and fun format. Adam Rado, the coordinator of a large Intensive English Program at UCLA Extenstion, has pulled together a wide range of engaging classroom materials. Young adults, community college students, and working professionals seeking to share life experiences and share perceptions in an ESL classroom will appreciate this unusual workbook. The first section, titled Grammar-based Conversation questions, includes revealing questions that allow students to practice their English in a safe, structured, and illuminating format. The author, conscious of the need to match vocabulary and grammar skills to student abilities, provides 11 worksheets for Basic students, 14 for intermediate, and 13 for advanced. My favorite exercises include: "too/very";"tell/say"; "take/get"; "for-in-ago"4; "do/make";"about verbs&"4; and modals. The flexible exercises can be used for communicative activities in a grammar class or a review exercise for a writing course. (I got Santa Monica Community College to adopt the book for both an Advanced Conversation and a Intermediate Grammar course.) The second section, titled information gathering activities, encourages students to interview other English speakers - in and outside of the classroom. The friendly questions also allow students to examine their own lives and share personal experiences. There are 100 pages of solid classroom exercises in these two section. The third section, titled";bingo activities", seems more popular with high school and college students than older immigrants and working professionals. Topics include food, drinks, last night, weekends, favorites, gender roles, family issues, and values. The casual tone appeals to younger folks and tends to make more self-conscious students less comfortable. Yet these exercises often evoke laughter who seem to enjoy the playful, chatty format. Perhaps the author will publish a separate book just on Bingo games, geared to the High School and College prep markets, in the future. Personally, I'd like to see the current book become two separate worktext books for that reason. Instructors must preview the questions, and might choose to change some sensitive questions. Despite this minor criticism, I constandly recommend this book to students and fellow teachers because it leads to genuinely interesting, revealing conversations. I've used exercises in settings ranging from workforce training courses and adult schools to commmunity colleges and elite private universities with very positive results. School directors, ESL instructors, and English language learners should find the material practical, provocative, and fun. The textbook's versatility, ironically, has probably hindered its incorporation into ESL curriculums since committees often want very narrow, specific books for each linguistic skill. That's a ";good mistake"; since students need to speak, try out new vocabulary words, and practice grammar in context. This valuable, and affordable, worktext achieves those simple goals. What more do you want from a ESL text? --Eric H. Roth, Venice Beach, CA. USA

Customer Reviews

Practical, provocative, and fun
As an ESL instructor who has taught conversation classes in several programs and often felt frustrated with superficial textbooks, "Conversation Pieces" stands out for its practical and fun format. Adam Rado, the coordinator of a large Intensive English Program at UCLA Extenstion, has pulled together a wide range of engaging classroom materials. Young adults, community college students, and working professionals seeking to share life experiences and share perceptions in an ESL classroom will appreciate this unusual workbook.

The first section, titled Grammar-based Conversation questions, includes revealing questions that allow students to practice their English in a safe, structured, and illuminating format. The author, conscious of the need to match vocabulary and grammar skills to student abilities, provides 11 worksheets for Basic students, 14 for intermediate, and 13 for advanced. My favorite exercises include: "too/very"; "tell/say"; "take/get"; "for-in-ago" "do/make" "about verbs" and modals. The flexible exercises can be used for communicative activities in a grammar class or a review exercise for a writing course. (I got Santa Monica Community College to adopt the book for both an Advanced Conversation and a Intermediate Grammar course.) The second section, titled information gathering activities, encourages students to interview other English speakers - in and outside of the classroom. The friendly questions also allow students to examine their own lives and share personal experiences. There are 100 pages of solid classroom exercises in these two section.

The third section, titled "bingo activities", seems more popular with high school and college students than older immigrants and working professionals. Topics include food, drinks, last night, weekends, favorites, gender roles, family issues, and values. The casual tone appeals to younger folks and tends to make more self-conscious students less comfortable. Yet these exercises often evoke laughter who seem to enjoy the playful, chatty format. Perhaps the author will publish a separate book just on Bingo games, geared to the High School and College prep markets, in the future. Personally, I'd like to see the current book become two separate worktext books for that reason. Instructors must preview the questions, and might choose to change some sensitive questions.

Despite this minor criticism, I constandly recommend this book to students and fellow teachers because it leads to genuinely interesting, revealing conversations. I've used exercises in settings ranging from workforce training courses and adult schools to commmunity colleges and elite private universities with very positive results.

School directors, ESL instructors, and English language learners should find the material practical, provocative, and fun. The textbook's versatility, ironically, has probably hindered its incorporation into ESL curriculums since committees often want very narrow, specific books for each linguistic skill. That's a "good mistake" since students need to speak, try out new vocabulary words, and practice grammar in context. This valuable, and affordable, worktext achieves those simple goals. What more do you want from a ESL text?