ESL Textbook Recommendations

April 4, 2009 5:22 PM

ESL Textbook Recommendations, anyone?

I'm starting to teach English to some private students and to a few classes. With my private student, I'm going through my teaching resources relatively quickly, and I'm going to need some new resources relatively soon. I'm in the states for a couple of weeks and figure that this is a good opportunity to buy a textbook or two and use it to help build lesson plans.

My lessons have currently been broken up as follows, which has turned out very nicely so far:
A. 10 minutes: Review of previous lesson
B. 20 minutes: Lesson on English in some new context: How to talk about locations of objects, how to do introductions, how to talk about your family, etc. Currently using http://humanities.byu.edu/elc/Teacher/sectiontwo/sectionII.html lessons
C. 10 minutes: Accent elimination work, etc (My private student is Korean)
D. 20 minutes: Grammar lesson: working on some verb tense

I need good source material primarily for topic B. Any ideas or recommendations?

posted by sdis to education (3 comments total)

A book I'm only somewhat familiar with but seems to fit your lesson B request would be the Market Leader series if your student is an adult with a professional or business job. It goes by function such as "receiving guests" "leading a meeting" etc...

I thought I'd mention For D, there is a grammar book "Grammar Express" - by Marjorie Fuchs and Margaret Bonner that I really like. It goes by topic in the form of Introductory comic/grammar chart with concept checking question/explanation and exceptions of grammar/ matching and or fill in the blank and or form the sentence etc exercises/ find the mistake in this paragraph. I really like the comprehensiveness and variety of ways it goes about explaining grammar. There are a couple levels.

Otherwise for D the Raymond Murphy books are very popular and have good explanations and exercises.

Many texts are now organized by function so you could pick up a used copy to spark ideas, or make photocopies of the inside page that lists the functions and what grammar/vocab/etc is to be learned in that section to help guide you.
posted by nzydarkxj at 7:26 PM on April 4

American Headway. Seriously, American Headway is what you want.
posted by smorange at 7:16 AM on April 5

A good friend of mine is the author of this series of textbooks. Cannot vouch for them myself but thought the link might be helpful.
posted by wittgenstein at 1:45 PM on April 5