Natural English Upper-Intermediate Student's Audio CD : A modern, speaking-centred general English course that helps students use language naturally.
‘To sound natural’ is a key aim of many English students.
natural English focuses very much on that aspect of communication, especially when speaking.
With this course, you cover the high-frequency, functional language that learners need to sound more natural at their level.
The Teacher’s Books include Teacher Development chapters on different teaching issues, specially written for each level.
Key Features
- natural English is a syllabus strand which enables students to integrate frequent, natural language into their language framework.
- Students learn to use real language naturally, through thinking and rehearsal time, confidence-building practice, and task-centred
speaking.
- The listening syllabus teaches students how to listen. A slot-in listening booklet features the tapescripts plus decoding and
pronunciation exercises.
- Teacher's Book lesson plans, a product of the authors' teacher training expertise, talk teachers through the course materials.
- Teacher's Book chapters cover teaching principles, techniques, and ideas, plus a selected bibliography.
- Humour engages and motivates through cartoons, and the listening and reading material.
If you’re looking for a challenging English course with a communicative syllabus, try natural English.
It covers all four skills – as you’d expect – but the focus here is definitely on the language that helps students sound more natural when they use English.
But what is natural English?
Natural English is language that is:
i) high-frequency, probably idiomatic
ii) outside traditional grammar and vocabulary syllabuses
iii) level-specific – it sounds immediately wrong, or unnatural, when used at a lower level
To find out exactly which language should inform the syllabus, the authors Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman used communicative activities to run trials between different levels of students. So, for intermediate:
‘We realized that a more realistic goal [than native speakers] for intermediate learners could be provided by those who had already broken through the intermediate barrier: upper-intermediate and low advanced learners of English.’
The authors ran trials between intermediate and upper-intermediate students, and identified the gaps in the intermediate learners’ language. This gave the authors the basis for the Intermediate syllabus.