Exploring English, 1995 Edition

Rating:
Summary: An Audio-lingual Textbook Posing as Communicative
Review: As an ESL teacher of six years and after studying the field of TESOL in graduate programs for 3 years, I have to say that this book is just another one to toss on the pile of ESL garbage materials. All the exercises are simple grammar substitution drills. The book attempts to cover too many forms in too few lessons. There are no explanations of grammar and no exploration opportunities to make such an inductive approach useful. Furthermore, I found the characters represented in the book to smack of stereotyping to the very point of racism. Do your students a favor and DO NOT adopt this book. If you must adopt it, make sure it's for the highschool audience it was written for and not for adult learners. I was forced to teach this book to adult learners for 5 years and even the very semi-literate beginners were not naive to the condescension involved in such a choice. I think the Northstar Series is much more communicative, and appropriate for adults.

Rating:
Summary: Best book for learning English
Review: Okay, I am an English teacher in Korea and I have been forced to teach many horrible books, but Exploring English is not one of these. This book is imaginative and fresh. The material is very well presented with many additional suggestions for expanding the material. The students enjoy this book. The best thing about this book is that it is simple to use and does not require an additional work book. I would encourage any teacher to use this series in the EFL/ESL classroom.