Work/Life English

G-3i: English in Everyday Life - Reading and Writing - Issues and Answers - Level 6 - Student

Book

Regular price $14.00 Sale

Author: Elaine Kirn

Suitable for: Secondary Students, Young Adults, Adults

What It Is: The WLE Level 6 Competency Based Reading/Writing Book is a 134-page student text designed to explore "Issues & Answers." As in the corresponding Grammar and Listening/Speaking books, its ten (10) Chapter titles are:

Families • Health & Fitness • Government & Law • Business & Work • Science & Technology • Consumerism • Education • The Environment • Immigration • Travel & Recreation

Why You Need It: Like many others, advanced learners and native speakers of English are often driven to understand the issues propagated by the media. By forming their own opinions and clarifying their values, they want to find their own place in the world and help improve it for future generations. This text focuses attention on the never-ending controversies of the past, present, and future. It's hoped that it will help people to sort out the often conflicting attitudes of their co-humans--and to address the problems facing people around the globe.

What It Does: The book reminds learners of some major "debatable issues" that have existed for a long time. It attempts to help them sort through the bombardment of facts, propaganda, and attempts to influence that surrounds us all.

An Introduction reviews salient points of "Reading for Meaning" and "Writing to Communicate."

Part One of each chapter first "introduces the issues" through pictures, listed vocabulary, and previewing questions. Its core is a Background Reading of five paragraphs with headings that indicate their sub-topics. These are followed by comprehension exercises, discussion questions, and statements to express opinions, agree, or disagree on.

Part Two is for "Building Vocabulary & Reading Skills." To systematize vocabulary acquisition, exercises make good use of synonyms, opposites, parts of speech, punctuation, compounds, connectors, related words, referencing, adjective clauses, connotation, ellipsis, affixes, approximate vs. exact meaning, and other features of words and phrases in the lexicon. Learners use these tools to better understand the subject matter and to express themselves on these issues.

Part Three offers "Practical Reading" tasks in the formats of simulated newspaper letters, news briefs, headlines, feature articles, graphs, public opinion surveys, editorials, and other types of print matter common in the media and online. Before going beyond the text to authentic reading, text users learn to understand, summarize, relate to, and comment on these.

Part Four is useful in "Writing About the Issues." It instructs and advises learners in writing conventions, organization of ideas, sentence combining, editing, revision, and other useful steps in written expression. Eventually, they write their own letters, explanations, narratives, descriptions, opinions, comparisons, arguments, and more--all "rhetorical forms" commonly taught/learned at advanced levels of language study.