Anyway, yeah, it really depends on your situation! And hurray for you for reviewing things on Amazon–there are not enough people doing so.

While I usually buy books at CATESOL or TESOL conferences, I often use Amazon since they have a very large collection of both new and used books. Because I sometimes also post reviews on Amazon and teach at a major university, I often get new titles sent to me as exam copies – and that is always nice. I’ve seldom had luck with the major chain bookstores which surprises me given the number of English language learners in Los Angeles, and have only once found a quality ESL book at a second hand store.

The situation, however, was the exact opposite when I taught in Vietnam last year. There I could only buy books directly from a handful of publishers with slimmed-down (censored) selections and at the one major ELT conference. Ironically, the chain bookstore there (Fahasa) had rows and rows of EFL books. It took me a few visits to recognize amidst the huge diversity of options, however, that almost the entire collection was composed of grammar, vocabulary, and test-prep books. (Novels, short stories, and readers were all in very short supply – along with writing and speaking materials). In that still closed society where mail often doesn’t arrive, I also discovered the advantages of ebooks.

Bottomline: I’ve had to adopt very different hunting strategies for quality ESL and EFL books.

Well, I really do want to write a whole post about this series, but yes, the vocabulary is chosen deliberately. According to the teacher’s guide, there is “contextualisation and recycling of new words” and “the vocabulary at each level is established by reference to recent corpus-based lexical research, analysis of commonly-occurring words in course materials and readers, and the Council of Europe’s Waystage and Threshold levels.” And of course Cambridge owns one of the major English-language corpora.

The books also use grammatical grading to gradually work through various grammatical structures. Specific structures are listed in the free teacher’s guide PDF on the website ( http://www.cambridge.org/elt/readers/teachers_guide.htm ). It’s too bad (for my students) that they have fairly few American English books on offer right now, but they’re increasing those.

However, I think the most important pedagogical underpinning is that interesting reading is more useful than boring reading! Ahem. (Seriously, though. Having sequenced vocabulary is useless if the students quit halfway through the first book.)

I know, it’s been a long week here too! Hang in there.

I’m being lazy, but the question may add value to this thread for later readers. It’s this: Do the Cambridge Readers use anything like Nation’s 2.000 Most Frequent Words in English – I’ve forgotten the exact name of this, but you know what I mean – or any other method of introducing the essential high-frequency vocab in a graduated manner?

That’s what I like about the Longman/Penguin approach: the linguistic analysis of contemporary word frequency informs its framework.

Yuck, I hate my own language in this comment, but it’s Friday, I’m at school and zapped. Forgive it.

Simply put: what’s the pedagogical / SLA underpinning of the Cambridge series?

Sheesh, Clay, take a nap.

Really no self-promo intended here. Just an invitation to some pretty interesting viewpoints (and a cool talk with a Norwegian guy about ELL and technology toward the end).

C.

The big difference between the recent Cambridge readers and the Penguin/Longman readers that I looked at is that the Cambridge books are original fiction written with ELL readers in mind. The language is fairly lively given the restraints, and the stories are engaging. The Penguin/Longman ones that I’ve seen were mostly retellings of classics or contemporary bestsellers, and had all life sucked out of them. I mean, with Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde, etc., a lot of the interest for a reader comes from the wonderful use of language. Just stripping that out and relating the plot in words of two syllables or less doesn’t leave much for a reader to enjoy. The IEP I worked at had a cabinet full of these, and the students hated them. They had trouble relating to the historic settings for the classics, too.

So far all of the clients I’ve lent Cambridge readers to have enjoyed them. I actually found the first one I tried, which I was given at TESOL last year, to be interesting enough that I read the whole thing myself. Yes, it was simple, but the stories were fairly involving (they were Twilight Zone/O. Henry-like). With the Penguin readers, I gave up in boredom after about three pages.

I know some people really like Penguin/Longman, and maybe I need to give them another try. We should have a Graded Readers Cage Match once I get enough readers and commenters!

If you’re ever in Shanghai (I lived there from ’01-’06), go to the Foreign Language Bookstore downtown. Since it’s China, English is a foreign language there

You’ll find INCREDIBLE savings – 10% of list price – on EFL pedagogy and research books from Cambridge, Oxford, etc. AND you’ll find all the Penguin/Longman Readers and their competitors.

Question: Why do you prefer the Cambridge Readers (implicitly) over the Longman series?