Book of the Month
Macmillan Topics: Environment

Publisher: Macmillan
Author: Susan Holden
€4.10

ISBN 978-3-19-042967

Elementary


This is an interesting idea. Take a topic and present it in a series of magazine-style articles as reading practice material. Put the articles into a colourful little booklet and sell it at a price that makes it worthwhile for members of a class to each get a copy. There is enough material here to keep a class busy for one lesson a week for a term, or for the book to be used as homework. If the books are kept as a class set in a school library then this would be excellent value for money. This useful concept is more than a bit spoiled by trying very hard to make the booklet up-to-date and 'kewl' inside the pages, (the book seems to shout 'Hey! I speak teenager!) and using marketing-speak at its most incomprehensible on the back cover. 'The reader's personal experience is placed at the centre of the reading process' it says. Well, yes. That's why it's called 'reading'. But wait - there are also 'challenging insights into the modern intercultural world from a teenager's viewpoint'. Actually, there aren't, unless very conventional views on the environment are somehow challenging. Nor is the 'light-hearted' quiz particularly light-hearted.

Once you have stopped being annoyed by the marketing, the contents are well written (did Ms Holden approve the marketing text I wonder?) and give a clear discussion of environmental issues in twelve chapters on topics such as 'using water' 'energy' and 'natural disasters'. As is to be expected of the format there is more space given to colourful pictures than to the text itself, and even the text is sometimes printed over a background picture. Each page has a 'word file' at the bottom with appropriate vocabulary help, and in keeping with its up-to-the moment approach links are also given to useful websites (though being old-fashioned print, the book has to admit that it might not be up to date on changing website addresses). Overall, the vocabulary and grammar are appropriate for the target audience and manage to make the text interesting without being patronizing. At the back are a series of projects - e.g. adopt an endangered species, think of a slogan for it, and design a t-shirt to raise awareness of its plight. It's debatable whether this will do anything for the species in question, but it's a useful language exercise. There's also another attempt to be trendy with a 'Teens chat' extract from a chatroom at the back. Here a pair of teens 'chat' using incredibly good slang-free and 'txt'-free language with perfect punctuation. Just what every typical teen chatroom on the internet is not.

Who is this book for? A class of young teenagers will enjoy using this book, and Ms Holden seems to have written with classroom experience in mind. Self-learners should also find this book useful, and if they do there are other books in the series including 'Consumers', 'Festivals' and 'People' for various levels.

Verdict: Painfully trendy, but otherwise good
Assessment 6/10


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