This nine-book course consists of three stages: Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced. The course was designed with two main 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 non-native speakers' level of competence in English, and
b) to facilitate students' understanding of the spoken English of modern American media, principally TV, and enable them to use its expressions and speech patterns. In this way, students develop the ability to communicate naturally and effectively in current American English.
The main sources used in the selection of the basic vocabulary of the course 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, and
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.
| WORDS |
CONVERSATION% |
FICTION% |
NEWSPAPERS% |
ACADEMIC
TEXTS % |
| 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.
In order to accomplish its second main objective, CCLS also made use of its own list of 5461 words and expressions when choosing the vocabulary used in Password: Effective_Communication (PEC). This list was extracted from CCLS's extensive corpus of approximately 5000 minutes of transcriptions of current American sitcoms. During the course students will learn over 1350 of the most useful words and expressions on this list.
Clearly, mastery of the vocabulary presented in Password: Effective_Communication will guarantee the learner an exceptional level of communicative competence in both general and academic English.
It should be pointed out that, at all levels of the course, the vocabulary presented is accompanied by the grammatical structures essential for communication. All of the material is presented in a dynamic, engaging way that respects the cultural aspect of the English language and ensures that the students' experience is a pleasant and enjoyable one.
Each level of the course consists of a Textbook, a CALL Workbook and a special Listening Comprehension Practice book, material designed to develop students' competence in the four basic language skills.
BOOK 5
Password: Effective_Communication - Intermediate Stage - Book 5 is designed for teenagers and young adults who have some prior knowledge of the English language.
Each lesson in this book contains a number of dynamically presented real-life situational dialogues. Real-life dialogues are also present in a mini-sitcom, the content of which appears in Lessons 2, 5, 8, and 11. The dialogues 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 communicate effectively in English. Both the formal and everyday American speech introduced in the dialogues serve as the basis for all subsequent classroom work.
This book contains the following sections:
- Words in Action,
- Text (Situational Dialogues and Mini-sitcom),
- Reading Text,
- Going Further,
- The Grammar You Need,
- Using What You've Learned,
- For Your Information, and
- Just for Fun.
At the end of this book, there is a list of all the new words and expressions presented in the situational dialogues, and the mini-sitcom as well as a list containing all the verbs learned since the beginning of the Elementary Stage in their infinitive, past, and past participle forms.
Password: Effective_Communication - Intermediate Stage - Book 5 contains 383 new words.