Working with architects and project managers who increasingly had to hold meetings with clients in English, I was searching for a coursebook that could help me deliver quick results.
Clear, concise, and to the point, this one is choc-full of highly relevant functional language presented through recordings that sound natural even if they are not authentic.
Six units cover the language you would expect: for opening a meeting, presenting information, problem-solving, explaining and clarifying, agreeing and disagreeing, summarising and closing. Plenty of practice exercises are provided and there are photocopiable worksheets for freer speaking activities. There is a helpful needs analysis learning journal and post-course exercise that focuses students on identifying and then reaching their future goals.
The clean, logical layout with plenty of white space, helpful tips on yellow sticky notes, and a reference section for each unit make this book easy to follow. My students appreciated the study suggestions dotted throughout but complained about the photographs – “the people don’t look real!” Indeed, they do look rather as though their home is a mail order catalogue.
The author recommends the book for pre-intermediate and intermediate levels, but it wasn’t ‘too easy’ for my upper-intermediates: on the contrary, they discovered plenty of functional and idiomatic phrases that they hadn’t previously known.
Various other titles exist in this series, and I shall be trying them out.
Liz Wilson
