The U.S.A.: Customs and Institutions: A Survey of American Culture and Traditions: An Advanced Reader for ESL and Efl Students

Thank you for your comment on our book. The 4th edition of this book (Feb. 2001) resolves the problems identified by the previous commenter. It has updated statistics, all new art, and shorter sentence structure. The vocabulary has also been simplified a little. The teacher's manual has just been released and is a useful supplement to the text. The text works well with community college ESL students as well as university students. It's also a popular text in high school ESL classes and in advanced adult education classes. It's also a handy guide for foreigners just looking to learn more about the U.S.

I would give this text 5 stars except for 2 large flaws: although I thoroughly enjoyed using this with my classes at a University, when I tried to use it in an advanced adult ed. class through our county, Tiersky's sentence structures were just too complicated for most of my students. They would get lost halfway through the sentences and forget what the subjects of the sentences were! The 2nd flaw is the book's age: since it's an intro. to America, many of the chapters rely heavily on statistics. It's impossible to use that kind of a text with any authority when it's 10 years old.