4000 Essential English Words, Book 1 Perfect Paperback – 1 Jun. 2009

読解、語彙力を高めるのにとてもよいです。文の内容も知的好奇心をくすぐります。

4000 Essential English Words Book 1 by Paul Nation is a wonderful and well-organized vocabulary book. Each unit has 20 target words with multiple learning exercises that learners can use to practice the vocabulary. Also, I was happy to see that the book uses the target words in a reading passage. This allows the learner to see how the words are used in context while also providing some comprehension questions over the reading material. In addition, you can download audio recordings of the vocabulary words and of the reading passages from the publishers website. I am confident this book will be a great benefit to my ESL students who desperately need direct vocabulary instruction.

I bought all six books in this series. And I am finding them very useful with my classes of very capable year 10, 11 and 12 students in Viet Nam.Like other reviewers I have an extremely high regard for the work of Professor ISP (Paul) Nation and have adopted his four strands theory as the framework for English language course development. I have drawn up a chart showing the aspects of each strand and given it to my EFL students so that we can all check at the end of each session that we are covering input and output language skills, paying deliberate attention to language features and to developing fluency.A careful reading of five of Paul Nation's texts on foreign language teaching and learning has convinced me that vocabulary development really is essential and basic to learning a second language. Many texts suggest that students can work out meaning from context but in EFL teaching I have found this assertion not to be supported by the evidence of my own eyes. Nation also questions this assumption and in two of his texts - Learning Vocabulary in Another Language and Teaching Vocabulary - he notes how much value is to be gained by using lists of the 4,000 most frequently occurring English words. Those words are easy to identify but finding useful ways of remembering the meaning as well as being able to read, write, say and understand each spoken word is quite a challenge, not only for students but for EFL teachers. And finding materials that introduce those words in a carefully controlled manner is like looking for hens' teeth.These books are a huge help. Their vocabulary use is carefully controlled. Each title has 30 units and each unit introduces 20 new vocabulary items and uses them in the story. Each unit also contains two pre-reading exercises to reinforce the vocabulary learning and two post-reading exercises to test comprehension. The comprehension questions are a little easy for my students but they do support the development of their fluency, both prosody and speed, which are aspects I am also focusing on.There are several reasons for giving only four stars. The first is that I do find some of the word definitions to be less precise than I would like plus the examples giving a use of each word don't always help reinforce the meaning. Some have a bit too much context and that context is foreign to my students. A couple of word changes here and there would have made the examples much more useful than they are, both for simple understanding and for possible future use in exercises like "chunking". And again, as with the Reading for Speed and Fluency series, the pieces are not exemplars of good writing. However, for me, this is less important in the vocabulary learning context than it is in the fluency development context. I appreciate that it is a huge ask to seek both controlled vocabulary AND have scintillating writing in the same piece.I am grateful to have these texts as so little of what is commercially published for native English speakers is suited to EFL learners in countries like Viet Nam. But often that is all that is available. How I do wish some other publishers would read Nation's texts and follow his example by not introducing lexical sets, such as the names of six colours, in one exercise.This series is great for older learners. But what is needed now are better materials for children in primary schools at their first point of introduction to English.

英語を教えています。教材としていい本はないかと探していて、店頭で中身をチェックし、アマゾンで注文しました。とてもいい内容･構成だと思います。

The book is very important, easy to understand I recommend this book to everyonewho want to learn daily phrases, I am looking forward to buy second book.Extremely powerful.Thanks