Vocabulary for ESL - A book review - Developing Intermediate Vocabulary

Developing Intermediate Vocabulary is an excellent book with generic topics that can fit into any classroom in any country in the world. There are twenty interesting topics, each four pages long, plus five review units. Each unit has a text that varies from 250 to 350 words in length from authentic sources such as magazine and newspaper articles, emails and short stories.

 Each unit has a basic pattern of organisation which I found assists students in completing tasks by being consistent. The introduction to each unit contains key vocabulary that the student must match to a meaning, or use a dictionary to check the meaning when unsure. Students then read the text and fill the key vocabulary into gaps. This is followed by a variety of exercises based on the vocabulary occurring in the text. These include collocation, phrasal verbs, idioms, word building, formal and informal words, compound nouns, compound adjectives and homophones. Each unit then concludes with some extension exercises and some practice or a puzzle.

The units can be studied in any order which makes this book very versatile. I found that I could group them according to topics my class were studying. For example, when we were studying technology, I used ‘A day without the Internet’, ‘Mobile phones’ and ‘Emails home’ as they complemented the class topics and extended our discussions of using technology.

 The book is also very easy to use. I left the unit on sheepdogs for a relief teacher who reported very favourably on how smoothly the lesson proceeded and strengthened her confidence in using this unit for her lesson. However, it is also a book that students can use for self-study or can be used as a homework resource. Developing Intermediate Vocabulary can be purchased with or without the answer key. I prefer my class sets to be without the answer key.

 While some of the texts are specifically British based, many of them are not country specific, and that makes the book versatile, however one unit is about Britain’s environmental problem of what to do with old tyres. This paved the way for my Australian class to research what we do with old tyres, and produce a similar text for our situation.

‘Camera rage in Hawaii’ introduces students to some American English and the strong adjectives used by people protesting the use of speed cameras. This unit sparked interesting debates in my class about the use of speed cameras and other privacy issues. The study of strong adjectives also helped my students develop additional assertiveness in their expressions.

I found the topics in this book slotted easily into other coursework that I was doing with my students. For example, I had designed a group of lessons based on temperature and was able to build three units of this book into that topic, i.e. ‘A short history of frozen food’, ‘Volcanoes’ and ‘Freak weather’.

These topics offered some variety that I may otherwise not have covered and gave the students a chance to broaden their outlook of how temperature can be explored. The short history of frozen food begins with a vocabulary learning exercise before reading an article about ClarenceBirdseye who commercialized frozen food following his experiences in the Canadian Arctic during three winters from 1910 to 1913.

This interesting text, which includes gap filling, is followed by an exercise on verbs and prepositions with a focus on for, from, in, of, on and with. A motivating synonyms exercise follows before an extension exercise on word stress.

Still drawing on the context, the next exercise studies different types of materials that goods are made from, before exploring occupations and finally presents a puzzle to finish off the unit. In this case, it is a hidden word puzzle with clues to find and circle words horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

Following this focus on frozen temperatures, I moved onto the unit about volcanoes which has an interesting diagram that has to be labelled then a related word exercise to extend use of the new words presented in the unit. This is followed by a collocation exercise using words pertaining to size, then an extension exercise on idioms with size adjectives, and finally work on plurals of nouns ending in ‘o’. Instead of finishing with a puzzle, this unit ends with a practice exercise in planning to live with volcanoes in the future.

The topic about freak weather patterns was a good unit to study when I was ready to move on to how temperature and changing weather patterns are effecting costal management.

What I like most about this book is that the units of work have interesting topics and the chosen texts are engaging and suitable for adult learners at intermediate level. Other units have topics such as “The future of music”, “Is chewing gum good for you?”, “Job stress in Sweden”, “Rowing across the Atlantic”, “A journey to remember”, “Claiming compensation”, “Odd news”, “New carrots”, “The writer” and “An unusual suggestion”, therefore offering a good variety to suit all tastes.

 An additional strength of this book is the index. I can easily look up verb collocations for ‘have’ and find that this is included in unit 8, or adjectives ending in ‘-ed / -ing’ will be in unit 9. Providing your students know the vocabulary, it would be possible to use these sections in isolation for additional grammar practice.

Simon Haines has written an excellent book that teaches grammar in context from a wide variety of text types that give students a taste of many styles of writing. Developing Intermediate Vocabulary is an excellent example of learning English through content based, authentic texts and I highly recommend this book to anyone searching for good content based learning.

Developing Intermediate Vocabulary

Written by  Simon Haines

Published by  Georgian Press, 2003