Check Your English Vocabulary For IELTS, by Rawdon Wyatt

Although this is not a book that would interest me personally in terms of improving my own knowledge of English, I am in general and have always been interested in textbooks and educational material from the point of view of seeing what is taught, how it is taught, and what sort of animating spirit operates in the book. As someone who has often been a tutor if rarely a formal teacher, I have often had the recourse of seeing what sort of textbooks that other people have to deal with, and though I have never written a textbook myself, it is interesting to see how they are structured and organized and put together in order to help achieve the goal of teaching the learner. There is much that we can learn from works in seeing the way that they are or are not well-suited to the goals of instruction. It can also be interesting to see what kind of lessons a book is trying to teach. Often, I have found, textbooks are written on at least two levels, with some kind of obvious subject matter that one is trying to teach and also some kind of thinking about or approach to the subject matter that one is also trying to teach. A lot of books, unfortunately, focus far more on that second layer of instruction than on the level of the material itself. How does this book fare?

In terms of its contents, this book is between 100 and 150 pages, and touts itself as being ideal for self-study or classroom use. It is divided unequally into four parts. The first, and largest part, which takes up about half of the book’s total contents, is a lenghty series of exercises that help to teach general vocabulary. These lessons, which include fill in the blanks, matching, multiple choice, and yes/no questions, are organized in a topical fashion. Included are such topics as transition words, changes, confusing words, false cognates, context and meaning, comparison and contrast, likes and dislikes, opposites, phrasal words, time, and interview expressions. These general vocabulary words are organized in an alphabetical fashion by how the author views them. The second category, which takes up most of the remaining space of the book, is organized by specific topics, also organized in an alphabetical fashion, into such topics as architecture, the arts, business, children and the family, crime and the law, education, the environment, food and diet, geography, global problems, healthcare, men and women, money and finance, science and technology, sports, travel, and work. The third section of the book is made up of practice tasks, called “productive practice,” which involve larger writing prompts for the writing section of the IELTS, and which also include sample answers. The fourth and final section of the book is an answer key for the earlier parts of the book, which are most of use to teachers as well as those engaged in self-study.

This book is at its best when it is teaching vocabulary and showing the sorts of questions that use English words and help people to think about the meanings and use of words for the IELTS examination. Unfortunately, there is more to this book than just the teaching of vocabulary. In many ways, this book not only seeks to teach the vocabulary to master English, but also a particular view about that vocabulary. For example, in one of the exercises there is a talk about women and work, and the author asks whether male-dominated is a good thing or a bad thing, and views it as a bad thing when it is a neutral thing at worst and sometimes even a good thing. Books like this are good evidence of the fact that ideology creeps into everything we write. Even reference works are written from the perspective and point of view of the writer, and where that is defective and problematic one cannot even learn vocabulary without seeing something of the corrupt mind of the contemporary leftist writer. It would be nice if a book like this could be recommended, and there is certainly value in this book, but unfortunately it is not a book that one can recommend warmly even if good can be taken from it.