Weaving It Together 2

I was compelled to write a review after seeing that posted by the other educator. I teach an ESL Intermediate Low A class (level 3) through Los Angeles Unified School District. My "module" is strictly reading and writing, with 90% emphasis on writing. The reading serves more for model analysis, and to acquaint students with vocabulary they need for their paragraphs. Most of my students have less than 6 years of formal education in their country; most have never written a paragraph in any language. I have piloted and sampled many texts targeted for this demographic and found that either there wasn't enough reading, or there wasn't enough writing lesson. WIT has just the right balance. Unless an educator writes their own book, there will never be a "perfect" text, and one must always bring in supplemental material, often created by the teacher themselves. My students need a lot of prep and reinforcement, usually before we attack the writing lessons in WIT. We do a lot of elementary work with "compound sentences" or "writing conclusions," for example, before we then read and practice those topics in WIT. I have used this book for many years in my class, and continue to be grateful to Ms. Broukal for writing it. BTW, after the promotional tests, I've also used the companion videos as a special "treat" for the students, and also to be sure to cover all the pages in this text, which is a little expensive for them. One more point is that the companion CD, narrating the reading sections of each chapter, is also a boon, and saves time as we don't then have to read the stories out loud. As I have indicated, 90% of what we do is writing; the students get a lot of reading analysis and discussion in their other classes.