Last year, I wrote a textbook with Ben Backwell called GOAL – Identify and Achieve Your Life Goals. We have been very happy with the feedback from teachers and students. However, as a tool for learning English, we felt that the book could be improved. So we have been hard at work.
And now after several months of rewriting, we are proud to present the 2nd edition of GOAL.
We believe that our work has been successful in turning GOAL into a really useful EFL book. To make teachers’ jobs easier and to help student to learn more effectively, we have standardised the format of every unit.
The new format of each of the nine units in the textbook is summarised below.
Review
People need to review things. That’s how we really learn because we go back to the material a second or third time, we begin to remember and understand at a much deeper level. Reviewing also leads to better long-term retention of material. Too many textbooks treat every unit separately. We have deliberately included the Review section to help students to review the previous unit. This concept of review is also carried throughout the book through a series of icons and smaller reviews within every unit.
Preview
Teachers know that we need to activate students’ existing knowledge before we start teaching them anything new. Otherwise, students have no framework in which to contextualize the new learning. So every unit has a simple Preview section that aims to get students thinking about the unit’s ideas using what they already know.
Useful Words
This is a simple vocabulary list of the useful or difficult words within the unit. It can be used in whatever ways you like to teach vocabulary.
Reading
The Reading section is on page 2 of each unit. It introduces the main idea and techniques of the unit. It is followed by comprehension questions which help students to understand the content more fully.
Listening 1 & 2
We have put a huge amount of work into creating useful listening activities that will help to both improve student language ability and also help to teach the goal techniques. Most of the listenings fall into two types:
- stories which illustrate the technique or provide a different perspective
- demonstrations which show the students how the techniques are used.
All of the listening will be available on the website from April.
Over to You
This is the key section of each unit. Over to You is the time when students actually carry out the techniques to identify and achieve their goals. These are generally done in pairs or groups to suit modern communicative classrooms. Students also have opportunities to make presentations.
We are proud of GOAL and hope that you will find it useful in your classroom.