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MASTERING ENGLISH FOR SUCCESS
Mastering English for Success (MASTER) is a two-book series designed for teenagers and adults. Master 1 and Master 2 continue the development of English language skills begun in the Password: Effective_Communication (PEC) series, following the same basic philosophy of language learning.
MASTER was designed with the following objectives in mind:
a) To prepare students for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL®), the most widely recognized international test that evaluates nonnative speakers’ level of competence in English.
b) To improve students’ knowledge of the English language and their ability to use its expressions and speech patterns in such a way as to enable them to communicate naturally and effectively in current American English.
c) To practice inferring the meaning of words through their context as well as looking up unknown words and expressions with the use of a dictionary.
d) To improve students’ writing skills through techniques that will enable them to better organize their ideas and express them more clearly in written form.
e) To help students better understand and interpret texts in general through reading comprehension exercises.
The main sources used in the selection of the basic vocabulary were:
a) Paul Nation’s adaptation of the classic high-frequency word list known as the General Service List (GSL) containing the 2284 most commonly used words in the English language.
b) The Academic Word List (AWL), consisting of 570 words selected because of the frequency with which they appear in a broad range of academic texts.
The following table* illustrates the importance of these words for the understanding of various types of speech and writing.
TEXTS % |
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| First 1000 | 84.3 | 82.3 | 75.6 | 73.5 |
| 1001 to 2000 | 6.0 | 5.1 | 4.7 | 4.6 |
| AWL | 1.9 | 1.7 | 3.9 | 8.5 |
| 92.2 | 89.1 | 84.2 | 86.6 |
* This table is an adaptation of Table 1.7 in I. S. P. Nation, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 17.
As a complementary source in the selection of vocabulary for MASTER, CCLS has also used its own list of 6553 words and expressions extracted from CCLS’s extensive corpus of approximately 6000 minutes of transcriptions of current American sitcoms.
Students entering the MASTER series already have an extensive vocabulary and dominate the basic structures of the language, eliminating the need for the repetition of structures and vocabulary. They will develop critical thinking and further broaden their language skills by answering questions, discussing diverse topics, and participating in activities that lead to their mastery of the language.
Clearly, mastery of the vocabulary presented in MASTER will guarantee the learner a high level of communicative competence in both general and academic English.
It should be pointed out that the vocabulary presented in both books of the series is accompanied by more advanced grammatical structures. All of the material is presented in a dynamic, engaging way that accurately reflects the cultural aspect of the English language and ensures that the students’ experience is a pleasant and enjoyable one.
Each level of MASTER consists of a Textbook, a Workbook, and a Listening Comprehension Practice book—material which has been developed specifically to improve students’ competence in the four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
During a seminar on case studies and discussion leadership at the renowned Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, members of the CCAA/CCLS staff recognized the unique potential of the Case Study Method for helping English language learners improve and practice their language skills. As a result, they developed a number of lessons based on case studies for use in the Mastering English for Success series.
The objective of the Mastering English for Success series, as the title suggests, is to enable students to master the English language. Committed participation in interactive classroom activities that integrate the four basic language skills and completion of out-of-class assignments ensure a high level of language proficiency and make it possible for students to attain the success they aspire to.
BOOK 1
In Mastering English for Success—Book 1, four different types of lessons are presented. Although all four types use a variety of materials for integrated work, the central focus of each lesson is on one of the following types of material:
• Videos
• Texts from two different sources
• Cases
• Magazine Articles
All of the above-mentioned material has been selected to familiarize students with the carefully chosen high-frequency vocabulary on the word frequency lists already mentioned. This is the vocabulary students need to know in order to be able to develop their skills of understanding and communicating effectively and naturally in English. Both the formal and everyday American speech introduced in the material serve as the basis for all subsequent classroom work.
This book contains the following sections:
• Post-Viewing Activities
• Two Different Sources (text and dialogue; debate and text)
• Case (Part 1)
• Magazine Article
• Vocabulary
• Focus on Language
• Focus on Grammar
• Focus on Culture
• Just For Fun
At the end of this book, students will find the audio script for the dialogue in Lesson 2 and for the debate in Lesson 6, a list of all the new words and expressions presented in the lessons, and a list of all verbs learned in the PEC series and MASTER 1.
Mastering English for Success—Book 1 contains 1141 new words.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS |