Everyone has to be a listener sometimes; at lectures, presentations, meetings, and on the telephone, we spend a lot of our time listening to others talking. We all know, then, that the average standard of spoken presentation is poor. We are often bored, irritated, even embarrassed as listeners; rarely are we captivated, or filled with new enthusiasm for a topic and with respect for the speaker. I suppose most people when they suffer an appalling presentation vow that when their turn comes they will do better.

The puzzles in this book are for young learners between 7 to 10 years. They are easy to use, and have a number of aims: Puzzles are fun. They are graphic, attractive and enjoyable challenge to complete. Pupils enjoy being able to complete a puzzle in another language. Pupils benefit from developing their own skills and strategies for learning. When young learners are completing one of these puzzles, they are discovering their strengths and weaknesses in English. They are finding gaps in their knowledge, and developing and using skills to fill those gaps.

Teaching English to Children is a valuable resource book for anyone teaching English to young learners. It is full of ideas and activities which can be adapted for use with children of any age and it gives much practical advice on the planning of lessons and the organisation of the classroom.

This book is intended to help teachers who find themselves in a similar teaching dilemma. It shows the ways in which several teachers and I have implemented vocabulary practices that move away from decontextualized, single definitions and toward a concept-based, multilayered knowledge of words. The strategies shared here are consistent with research on how we learn new words, connect them to our existing knowledge, and retrieve them when we want to use them in reading, writing, and speaking.

Elementary Listening contains 36 communicative worksheets based around listening graded at elementary level. Each self-contained lesson includes pre-listening, while listening and post-listening tasks to ensure full exploitation and understanding of each recording. Worksheets can be selected by structure, discussion topic or literature and will act as a useful supplement to any elementary coursebook. Answers are included in the Teacher’s Notes.

Vocabulary Games and Activities 2 forms part of the Penguin series of books for teachers and contains sixty activities for practising and revising vocabulary. These games and activities range in level from elementary to advanced and include a wide variety of different exercise types: bingo activities, matching pair activities, crosswords, dominoes, quizzes, word grouping activities, word mazes, logical problems, etc.

Successful Writing Proficiency provides a thorough preparation for the different types of writing necessary for students at advanced levels. The book focuses on the needs of students wishing to sit the Cambridge CAE and CPE examinations as well as any other examinations at similarly advanced level and prepares students to write all types of composition, including descriptive, discursive, narrative, reports, articles, letters, transactional letters and reviews.

Successful Writing Proficiency provides a thorough preparation for the different types of writing necessary for students at advanced levels. The book focuses on the needs of students wishing to sit the Cambridge CAE and CPE examinations as well as any other examinations at similarly advanced level and prepares students to write all types of composition, including descriptive, discursive, narrative, reports, articles, letters, transactional letters and reviews.

David Crystal investigates the nature of the impact which the Internet is making on language. There is already a widespread popular mythology that the Internet is going to be bad for the future of language – that technospeak will rule, standards be lost, and creativity diminished as globalization imposes sameness. The argument of this book is the reverse: that the Internet is in fact enabling a dramatic expansion to take place in the range and variety of language, and is providing unprecedented opportunities for personal creativity.

This book is about building and using language tests and assessments. It does what it says on the tin: it is a practical approach. However, it does not provide ready-made solutions. Language testing is a complex social phenomenon, and its practice changes lives. The book therefore assumes that you will wish to think carefully about testing and its impact in your own context.