Product Description

A comprehensive, flexible, and up-to-date vocabulary reference and teaching tool for English language learning. The Oxford Picture Dictionary and its components create a highly teachable programme that can be used as a complete, four-skills beginning course, or as a language development supplement and practical reference. h4span style="font-size: smaller; color: #ff0000"NEW /span Grammar Activity Book/h4

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63853 in Books
• Published on: 1999-12-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 236 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Arabic

About the Author
Norma Shapiro has been involved with language teaching since 1982. She has conducted many workshops on vocabulary development, communicative activities, and using visuals in the classroom. Jayme Adelson-Goldstein is an ESL teacher-trainer,consultant, and author living in Northridge, California.

Customer Reviews

illustrated nouns and verbs
This is an excellent source book that names everything with pictures. For the English-speaking student of Arabic as well as the Arabic-speaking student of English, everyone learns how to name everything. This book is an essential language-learning tool.

ESL Resource Book
The intention of the Oxford Picture Dictionary Series is to instruct English Language Learners with parallel text. They are not meant to instruct English speakers to learn a second language. Keep this in mind before you buy the text.
It IS an excellent tool for beginning ELLs no matter what age level. Check out the tapes and CD rom, too.

good for Arabs learning English
As some reviewers have put it, this dictionary is a good learning tool for Arabs learning English but not for those beginnig to learn Arabic. This is easy to see just as one opens the book. As one reviewer pointed it (criticizing this by the way), the vocabulary presented is clearly american oriented, ie. the words an Arab will mostly use while living in the US, I suppose the audience of this book are Arab immigrants searching a new life in the US (as there are examples about the Green Card etc...), not just studying English anywhere in the world. For this audience I think this dictionary is quite good, specially as it sets the words in context, not in a vocabulary list.
It's stated that this book is for kids, but the format (few animals but many mechanical and industrial tools) of the book and it's length make it not suitable for very young children, but for teenagers or young adults with a good basic education and reading skills instead (the type is not very large).
Some reviewers have also written that this is not good for americans learning Arabic, as Arabic words are not vowelled neither transcribed, Arabic gender and plurals are not given nor verbs have their conjugated forms (perfet-imperfet-verbal noun) given together (neither their prepositional regime which is very important in Arabic as it's in English), so I would not recommend this book to anyone beginning to learn Arabic (I'm an Arabic teacher and have used this dictionary with intermediate students), but for someone with an intermediate knowledge trying to enlarge and expand his Arabic vocabulary, it can be very useful if used together with an Arabic dictionary like Wehr's, as it is easier to remember and learn new words in a clear context and together with related words than trying to learn them as individual items from a word list or a dictionary (specially homophonous English words like fly [two nouns and one verb]).
Overall this is a good dictionary for Arabs learning English and quite good for those learning Arabic when used with other material or with a teacher.