Rising Star: A Pre-First Certificate Course

Rising Star is the text book that I'm using currently with my teens.



I have some comments...



Advantages



Good idea to get them prepared for first certificate.
Interesting topics: Cloning


Disadvantages


Not interesting topics:
Chapter 4. Eclipses. It doesn't really give way to debate and is not really thought provoking.

Chapter 1 "the Global Teenager" Is this an ad for Benneton clothes? Why is there a picture of teenagers of different races all wearing Benneton clothes in different colours and then it says that Benneton respects individualism......??? To paraphrase the text: teenagers around the globe, we all have so much in common. Why does the book only focus on the positive aspects of globalisation? I turned it into a debate on globalisation.

Layout:
It takes on 3 or 4 tenses all at once, this is really confusing for the students.
You have to teach the tenses separately first before moving on to the book, otherwise you get a row of puzzled faces and a bombardment of questions.
Teaching the tenses beforehand means coming up with your own materials... which I don't mind doing but I would like to be able to rely on my book sometimes as well.


A lot of the grammar questions that come up such as gap fills give a certain tense in the teacher's book, but there are various possibilites depending on the context and of course no context is given. So you end up telling three different students that their different answers are right and they all get confused and don't believe you any more. Or you end up checking the teacher's book to see which answer they had in mind and the students pipe up "you don't know the answer!".

Layout 2
It all seems to be in the wrong order. The questions that you would tend to use as a lead in, which usually involve personalisation tend to be exercise 4, after the reading text, as in the reading on the global teenager.

The vocabulary section at the end of the reading text comes too late also, the difficult words are correctly predicted but to deal with them at the very end after comprehension questions is pointless because you will already have explained them to help them understand.

Context

Sometimes the book is following a theme and then all of a sudden you get a random gap fill sentence that has nothing to with anything.

Directed at teens?
Published in 2000, chapter two talks about a range of science fiction films, most of which teens have never heard of. One is Bladerunner, there is also Star Trek, and a reading about Gillian Anderson from the X-files.

I am aware that at the time of writing and publishing the X-files was popular but not any more. Students had never heard of it.
Other films could have been used, Bladerunner is from way long ago, the students didn't know it and they were bored stiff. Star Wars.. ok. Star Trek... not really their cup of tea I must say.

Unless they could think of films that will always be popular with teenagers maybe the theme isn't the best one.

LISTENING

I did the listening from chapter 6 today. Questions 1 and 2 were the gist questions asking the students opinions about tattoos and then asking how they would react if their partner got a tattoo or a piercing. Then they had to listen to the tape and compare their answers with the person speaking's answers. It was a very long script and the questions weren't relevant to the script - so what happened? The students switched off.