The intent of this book is to prepare British high school students to pass the A-level (high school leaving and de facto college admission) English language examination. Most of the authors are or have been official A-level examiners, which may explain the book’s popularity and evident success. The notable absence of statement of such intent may reflect the authors’ concern to avoid providing embarrassing evidence in the controversy in Britain about rising A-level exam scores, whose likely explanation is instructors teaching for the exam, as by this book.
The educational setting and purpose of this work are thus relevant to the controversy about whether the United States should have such standardized examinations.
This book is representative of the language awareness movement of English language education, as promoted by the association for language awareness (founded in 1994) and well represented in the United States by the anthology entitled Language Awareness (Rosa, Clark, & Eschholz, Reference Rosa, Clark and Eschholz2005). The idea seems to be that linguistics is important in native language education, but not to the extent of an introductory linguistics course; only needed is awareness of certain categories in the analysis of language. Students are made aware of things like acronyms, conjunctions, homophones, and pronoun reference, among others, but are not asked to deal with these theoretically or systematically. One wonders whether this limitation is based on educational principles or the linguistics phobia of many teachers.
The stated purpose is “to provide a foundation for the analysis of texts” (p. 15) with no prior knowledge of language analysis assumed. The six chapters concern signs and sounds, words and things, sentences and structures, written discourse, spoken discourse, and applications. Each presents a few texts with activities consisting of concepts to comment on, followed by the authors’ commentary to assure the effectiveness of the activities. Texts are short and varied, from signs and posters to excerpts from essays and novels.
