Anyone using the book series called Marbels. Bookman Books says it’s pretty new and popular.
What’s your feeling about this?
I have to schedule a journey just to get to the bookstore to take a look at the latest offerings…
Are you using it seems to rely a lot on online resources like an ebook for students and lots of videos and animation.
What kind of equipment does a student need to have to enjoy the full potential of the series.
If you think it’s not suitable, please suggest a decent general series for students.
My favorite series have now become out of print.
Looks like a pretty standard EFL textbook with an online platform. I haven’t had much luck with online platforms and Taiwanese students — they figure out how to hack their way to the answers instead of practicing the language, even if it takes longer to do so than just practicing the language.
The demo video you posted doesn’t have any audio for the videos in the series, so there’s no way to know if those will be simple language that aligns with the language of the lesson or if it would be far beyond their level of comprehension “in an effort to help them appreciate the topic” (this is dumb to me. If your goal is appreciation of a topic in a language class, the goal should be comprehension of the relevant language still). The stuff that the MOE/KangXuan/other English teachers around TW provide for audio visual support is almost always way too advanced for any Taiwanese student to comprehend, so I usually end up finding my own videos (from blogs/linked to YouTube)
My favorite K-6 textbook (as someone who picks random things from many different texts) for EFL is “Our World” from National Geographic. It covers a lot of topics and it really is a global English textbook (not just focused on US or UK culture like most books. Nor does it have stupid alien/monster characters that you follow along some weirdly and not well thought out plot line). I think Nat Geo has come out with more EFL texts since I started using Our World, but I don’t really use textbooks anymore. Something I have appreciated about Our World, though, is that it doesn’t go too stupidly into “modern technology”, so even though it’s a 10 year old book, I can use the vast majority of readings that are in it with my learners and there won’t be any eye rolls.
If I were forced into a traditional classroom and told I must use a textbook series, I’d go for something from National Geographic or Oxford. Oxford Phonics World is beyond satisfactory in getting both phonics and general language comprehension moving quickly, especially if you pair the Oxford phonics readers with the Oxford phonics textbooks. They scaffold sight words and recycle previously used language well enough that there aren’t random words coming in that have absolutely been forgotten from before.
Yeah. Thank you for your feedback. The video does have sound though. Maybe it needs to be played on YouTube. The promotional material uses mostly British english, I think.
We got up to the end of English travels for but the topic material is no longer relevant as it was to my past groups of children so I’m thinking of jumping ship and going to gateway gold level 2.
The problem with the Chinese students is they forget the basics and they don’t think in grammar so I’m looking for something to help reinforce the grammar.
This seems like a very entertaining online program but I’m not sure the kids are actually interested to pursue the videos on their own. Maybe just drilling grammar with games and basic conversation is the best way. Maybe I’m too old fashioned but I’m a stickler with proper subject verb agreement and tense agreement.
