Challenging Traditional Assumptions

This represents a challenge to the traditional assumptions behind generations of course books underpinned, as they have been, by inherited and highly durable grammar-centric notions of language learning (arising from a written model of the language, based on the grammar of written English).
This grammar bias is clearly misplaced if one considers that most language learners need, primarily, to communicate through spoken English.

Sea Change

Course materials have, at long last, moved away from the prescriptions of the traditional course book. A sea change has taken place in recent years in the way language teaching and learning is viewed , and course book writers have become aware of the need to reflect this. The 'natural English' syllabus (Oxford University Press) compiled by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman, is a good example of this - for it chimes in with more contemporary theoretical perspectives , which view the acquisition of lexis as the driving force behind language learning.

Prologue

Wake up and smell the citrus! On offer here is that liquidized, friut-based boost that your jaded bod thirsts for, as you plodd off to yet another hard graft at the ESL coalface. Come hither and sup.