Teaching Books

The Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East was just given to me by a Buddhist friend. I had never heard of Beard T. Spalding. What struck me the most is the similarity of these teachings - even in the phrases and words used - to Christian Science. It almost strikes me as plagiarism. Or is that a huge coincident?

Nonetheless, these books are fascinating and great food for thought and inspiration. Christian Science on steroids. It also reminded me of The Autobiography of a Yogi - a book I plan to re-read, after I re-read Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy.

These books lay the foundation for taking up the Great Work yourself. The accounts of the journeys within contain the guidelines to a priceless knowledge of self. The wisdom and awakening that can be felt is truly unlimited. May be the only books you will ever need...

These volumes offer great guidance and teachings for these difficult
times. We all have divinity within us and do not need permission of a church or organized religion to create our best life. These books are highly recommended to anyone starting their quest or already on the path to higher consciousness.

This set of books reveals Truth.. The world would be so much better off if they were Masters as described. The fine teachings are hard to find. These books describe the true abilities of all Men and Women. Enjoy the journey through them

Okay folks, it's time to wake up. First, it's been written on good authority that Spalding wrote the first three volumes of this "fantasy" before he ever left the United States, later admitting having visited these "masters" while in his astro-body. And then there is the overall racist tone to his writing. I am amazed no one has yet to mention this in a review (at least none that I've read). Spirituality based on racism is not true spirituality. If I could give it less than a single star, I would. Wake up America!

An excellent book: easy to read and understand, great ideas and arts philosophy.
The book is loaded with many very usable lessons, well defined learning objectives. Strong emphasis on the inclusion of curriculum and the arts as a double benefit for learning.
I would certainly recommend this book for all elementary teachers.

FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN EDUCATION provides an excellent basis for preprofessional instructors (students who are going to become teachers). The history and philosophy sections are not too involved with jargon to be useful to undergraduates. On the other hand, for those who have been away from teaching for a few years, for parents who want to find out what's going on, and for students who haven't previously examined education as history, this is a good start. The insets and anecdotes that are set apart from the main body of the text by boxes and underlining are somewhat confusing, but they also contain ideas that should be explored. The prose ranges from stilted to nicely-flowing.

This 8th edition could easily be replaced with the 7th edition for a lot less money. The chapters contain basically the same information AND the 7th edition comes with a cd with strategies and the 8th edition does not have any extras. This is a paperback book and for the money, you would be better off saving it and getting the 7th edition.

A couple years back my dad got demoted and was potentially going to lose his job. He was facing a lot of uncertainty and was not sure how to deal with it. I first read The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times in a high school philosophy class when I was dealing with a lot of my own personal problems and found it incredibly helpful and selected this book as an introduction to Chodron. Since reading this book my dad has started reading several other books about buddhist spirituality and has pursued meditation, all of which have helped him immensely both then and now. This book serves as a great tool for maintaining spiritual health and a comprehensive introduction to Buddhist spirituality and Pema Chodron.

Pema is accessible... Her writings are very helpful and exemplify the very compassion she teaches for herself and for ourselves and others...Her writing is grounded while pointing to the "ineffable". She makes Buddhism and meditation more ... well, meaningful for those in the trenches...all of us...very healing...simply good advice that she makes even clearer!!!Thank you Pema Chodron for your life and sharing so much of it. Another great book!!!

It's a best of some of her writings, and it's really good. It's a nice concise set of one and two page sections from her other books. Something that I found myself reading a second time.

Once in a great while a book like this comes along. It's so honest and plain and challenging at the same time. The short chapters and conciseness furthermore make it all the more accessible.

This book is quite enlightening. I can forsee reading many more of Chodron's books.

I purchased this text book for my sixth grader to use with a private Spanish teacher. It is a very comprehensive and well compiled textbook. It covers all necessary topics (grammar, reading/comprehension & writing) in a organized and easy to understand format.

If you had Spanish in high school but it's been a while since you've used it,then this is the perfect book for you! It begins with the simple present tense then progresses to the more complicated preterite and subjunctive. At the end of the book you will find interesting cultural tidbits to enhance your experience of learning the Spanish language. Have fun!

Although I agree that this book is certainly a bargain when compared to the standard textbook options that often cost 3-4 times as much, I was disappointed to find that no solutions to the exercises are provided. One must purchase ANOTHER book before the exercises in this book can really be said to be useful. I am a firm believer in immediate correction when it comes to language review and acquisition--spending time on exercises without knowing which you did wrong will only reinforce what are your misunderstandings of grammar. However, if you are willing (and able) to buy the solutions manual along with this book, then it will make a good review--though it won't be the bargain that it at first appeared.

As a Spanish 2 and 3 teacher I highly reccomend this book. I use it as a reference myself because it has great explanations and the order of the grammar structures is useful. I would reccomend getting an answer key along with the book. This is a great book to refresh your memory on grammatical structures.
I am glad I bought this book!

Repaso was used as my school textbook for higher level Spanish courses in high school. Everything is great about it. The instructions are in English which makes it even more compatable. The book is able to review old concepts, but has enough to teach the little proper things about Spanish. It is a great purchase for any student that is just learning Spanish or has been taking it for many years and needs a reference.

This is our second order of the book. It is used by our Tablet Users Group faculty members. We have had Thomas Angelo as a speaker at Rose-Hulman and were very pleased by him and his work. We would highly recommend Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. The book has been very well received and helpful teaching, evaluating & assessing classroom techniques.

The book arrived in perfect condition, even though it was listed as used. Arrived on time.

This book is a handbook-style text that elaborates on the concept of "Classroom Assessment Techniques," a term used by the authors to refer to alternative methods of evaluating or assessing student learning. The book is a handbook because each "CAT" is listed in terms of how to prepare, use, and evaluate results; the authors also present rather subjective indicants of the amount of time required for each technique.

The techniques range from the laughably simple (such as "muddiest point") to the more involved (such as student learning portfolios); the handbook is arranged in terms of types of assessment that may be conducted with each group of techniques. The book provides a wide variety of techniques, and the user should be able to find several applicable techniques for a particular educational situation.

However, I would strongly suggest that anyone using these techniques NOT rely on this text as the sole source of how and why to do educational assessment and evaluation -- the field is too complex and the implications are too important.

Excellent book! Angelo was very clear and concise in guiding teachers through the assessment process.

The text was used in a course through UW Stout and it is a very good resource for methods that can be used to assess learners progress towards a goal. Great tool to have on the bookshelf!

Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words is an ethnographic study of two greatly differing groups, both racially and economically, in the South-Eastern United States during the 1970s, and the difficulties created for teachers, due to language and learning differences, when they come together in the school system. These are, respectively, the black textile-working community of `Trackton', and the white business-owning townspeople of `Roadville'.

The language usage of the Trackton children often causes problems later on in the townspeople's schools. Aside from the difficulty they have with such concepts as time-space scheduling and the function of certain toys for certain purposes, due to their different learning strategies at home, class assignments can become a hindered task. First of all, language barriers exist between the teachers of Roadville and the black students from Trackton. Often times their word usage does not parallel and misunderstandings become regularity, such as the Trackton usage of the word "ain't" for "didn't" and the teacher's misunderstanding of it as "doesn't". This explains the instance of confusion in a conversation between a teacher and young Lem: "A teacher asked one day: `where is Susan? Isn't she here today?' Lem answered: "She ain't ride de bus.' The teacher responded: `She doesn't ride the bus, Lem.' Lem answered: `She do be ridin' de bus.' The teacher frowned at Lem and turned away" (Heath 276). Such miscommunications were commonplace between these two groups.

Trackton children would also have trouble following what to the teacher were simple directions. For example, Trackton children made a distinction between putting toys "away" and putting them "where they belonged" (Heath 280). Teachers would become frustrated when they asked the prior and found toys scattered in places where they "didn't belong," however, if the latter was asked, the task was completed properly. Also, Trackton's differing notion of truth played a large role in the frustrations. When it was time for story telling, the Trackton children excelled at fanciful tales. However, when asked to give a truthful account, they still embellished with lies, for "inside the classroom, their language play, incorporation of commercial characters, and many of their themes" that are actually valued in their culture "are unacceptable. The close personal network which gives Trackton stories their context and their meaning at home has no counterpart in the school" (Heath 297).

Unfortunately, the teachers initially misjudged these differences between the townspeople, including the teachers, and the Trackton children. But soon many teachers began to find an effective means of teaching the children and advancing their skills by using the terms and rules of the Trackton children themselves. They began to realize that the Trackton children were interpreting things such as workbook activities not in the wrong way, necessarily, but in a different way contrary to what the author had in mind. For instance, seeing three fish in a fishbowl and counting only one, because there was only one group of fish in the fishbowl (Heath 291). They began to use more visuals that made more sense to the Trackton children, like household products, photographs, and shopping games to perpetuate a learning environment. Some even had the children record their own conversations and those of others, to later replay and notice the differences in language use. All of these attempts, by the way, were successful.

Shirley Brice Heath dives into meticulous (I repeat, meticulous) detail on how these successes were and can again be achieved. The work is dense with information, and is therefore not light reading, but her guidance on using ethnographic technique to improve the classroom is invaluable to teachers, especially those who contend with a local culture that is in many ways foreign to their own. The author Amy Tan once wrote of her Chinese mother that because she spoke "broken" English, people assumed her thoughts were "broken" as well. Ways with Words reveals just how much can be falsely assumed through miscommunication, and how those barriers can be breached.

Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words is an immersing ethnography of communication, detailing the language socialization practices of two working-class Piedmont South Carolina communities, Roadville and Trackton, and the effects of these practices on their children's success in school. The peculiar characteristics of these two communities lend themselves particularly well to Heath's presentation of them as gestalts: both are small, geographically limited and centralized, and community members spend most of their non-working time there. Heath's thorough ethnographic description allows her to critique the oversimplifications of other studies of education; in doing so, however, she overcompensates by neglecting issues of class. The greatest contribution that Ways with Words makes to the larger field of linguistic anthropology is its tacit focus on iconicity, which strongly suggests that the emphasis on indexicality to the exclusion of iconicity in contemporary linguistic anthropology is seriously counterproductive.

Language Socialization in Roadville and Trackton
The white working-class families of Roadville have had connections to local textile mills for four generations, their relatives having come from the Appalachian Mountains to work (28) . The black working-class families of Trackton, on the other hand, have only been working in the mills for the two decades since the advent of desegregation (29). Desegregation has had an effect on more than just work: in the 1970s, black and white children started attending the same schools with both black and white teachers, leading to major difficulties for educators
Roadville and Trackton are alike in many ways: both are somewhat isolated working-class communities, neither of which occupy more than a single block, within a larger town. Life of community members, excepting work, school, and church, centers on their respective communities. Although not everybody of working age works in the local textile mills, all families have some members who do. Moreover, both communities are positively oriented toward school, believing it critical for future success beyond the mills. Despite these similarities, children in the two communities are socialized into language quite differently.
In Roadville, babies are spoken to as potential conversational partners from the moment of birth (118). Their actions are assumed to be intentional and meaning-laden, and their utterances taken to be referential (120-2). As they grow older, children are told the labels for things, and adults expect to hear this appropriate label recited upon request (127). Roadville adults value this kind of `right' knowledge that can be memorized and routinely repeated precisely as told.
Trackton stands in sharp contrast; here, babies are not seen as potential interactional partners. They are spoken about rather than to (74-5). They are nevertheless surrounded at all times by multiple ongoing communications, as community life is centered on an open plaza between their houses in which can be heard the overlapping voices of adults, older children, and radios (73). In coming to be competent speakers, Trackton children are on the stage of the plaza where the artful embellishment of stories is highly valued. Whereas in Roadville the rote recitation of conventional scripts is positively evaluated, in Trackton verbal creativity receives the highest praise.
Both people in Roadville and in Trackton tell stories, but the content, context, and purposes of these stories are quite dissimilar. In Roadville, stories are purely truthful and end with a moral that is applicable to the faults of all present, thus building a mutual community identity. In Trackton, stories are fictions that blossom from an initial germ of truth in an attempt to extol one's virtues and gain attention on the plaza (183-4).
There are no books in Trackton except the Bible and lesson books from school, but reading is nevertheless an important aspect of children's lives. It serves functional purposes when interacting with the mailman, and especially when going to the store (191-2). Prices and product names must be read, but text is strongly rooted in its context and visual appearance: when `Kellogg's' is presented in small-capitals, in contrast to its usual looping script, children cannot recognize the word (193).
In contrast, Roadville residents highly value reading as an activity with intrinsic value, but talk about reading is rarely followed up with actual reading (220). Children are, however, read bedtime stories as preschoolers. During these stories, parents ask their children to label objects in the story or occasionally to connect what is seen in the story to real-world information (223-4). After the age of three, however, the active participation of children in reading stories subsides, and children are to sit and listen passively (225-6).
In her description of the oral and literate traditions of both Roadville and Trackton, Heath presents a critique of over-simplified classifications. Neither community can be reduced to a dichotomy of `oral' vs. `literate', as both communities engage in both types of practice. Moreover, the complex and multiple uses of both written and spoken text (only some of which are detailed above) proscribe grouping both all oral traditions and all literate traditions together as `essentially the same' (230). In characterizing these distinct and nuanced characteristics of the oral and literate practices in Roadville and Trackton, she sets the stage for explaining the different experiences and challenges of children from these communities in school.

Roadville and Trackton Children in School
In the early grades of primary school, Roadville children generally excel. They are seen as polite; understand the ties of single functions to single spaces (e.g. a place to keep puzzles, a place to play with sand, etc.) (273); and recall lessons, events, and stories verbatim (301). Trackton children, on the other hand, flounder on all of these counts. Instead, they behave as they would in Trackton, using stories to divert accusations of misconduct and approaching toys and spaces as bricoleurs. When expected to tell stories, both groups of children fail to meet the expectations of teachers, but in highly differentiated ways. Unlike in Roadville, in the classroom fictive stories with ongoing evaluations of events are valued. Instead of such stories, Roadville children tend to deliver chronological recapitulations of actual events (301). Trackton children neither tell entirely nonfictive stories, nor do they meet expectations of setting up the context for their fictive stories (296-7). In both cases, the children's understanding of `story' is conditioned by norms for story telling in their respective communities, which differ substantially from the mainstream values of their teachers (295).
When discussing mainstream townspeople, the community from which these teachers generally come, Heath unhelpfully skirts around the issue of class. Although she does not hesitate to label both Trackton and Roadville as `working-class', she only ever hints at the fact that these particular townspeople are middle class, despite labeling mainstreamers as so in general (12). This omission is likely part of her anti-simplification project, which encompasses not only class, but dichotomies of oral vs. literate traditions (as explained above), race (3), and other single-factor explanations for children's success or failure in school (344). In rejecting class and race and embracing complexity, Heath attempts to dismiss both race and class as simple determiners of school success, which she does successfully by connecting the specific ways Roadville and Trackton children struggle in school to specific practices of language socialization and use in their home communities. By entirely neglecting class and race, however, she impinges on her own ability to connect her ethnography with a larger discourse concerning the reproduction of class. She criticizes `critics of education' for `arguing that the preschool language socialization patterns of the middle class ensure their preparedness in the knowledge and skills of symbolic manipulation of language required for school success' `with more abstractions than linguistic or cultural data' (404, note 1), s. Although she does not describe the middle class aspect of the process of class reproduction, she elegantly elaborates with abundant `linguistic and cultural data' two instances of the working-class side of class reproduction by showing how `preschool language socialization patterns' in working-class Roadville and Trackton ensure the unpreparedness of their children `in the knowledge and skills of symbolic manipulation of language required for school success'.

A Tale of Latent Iconicity
Because Heath is writing in part for a non-specialist audience, she largely refrains from using specific linguistic anthropological terminology. Nevertheless, latent within Ways with Words is a tale of iconicity, which infuses the story Heath tells about the way people use language: iconicity undergirds the linguistic ideologies of Trackton, the language habits of Roadville, and the judgments of students by mainstream teachers. In exploring the ways in which iconicity pervades language in Ways with Words, I hope to demonstrate the necessity for an awareness of iconicity in the description of language practices in Roadville and Trackton and the problems children encounter in school, thereby showing that the focus on indexicality to the exclusion of iconicity in contemporary linguistic anthropological discussions of pragmatics and metapragmatics is seriously counterproductive.

Iconicity In Trackton
One aspect of language use about which Trackton residents have a metalinguistic discourse is the variability in the meaning of signs that are iconic of each other over different contexts and with different intonation. A Trackton woman comments on the importance of understanding context, not merely text, for interpretation: `"Ain't no use me tellin' `im: `Learn dis, learn dat, what's dis? what's dat?' He just gotta learn, gotta know; he see one thing one place one time, he know how it go, see sump'n like it again, maybe it be de same, maybe it won't"' (105, Heath's emphasis). Children must be able to recognize contexts, then, in order to understand language (or indeed any signs), and part of language socialization is encountering tokens of different types of contexts. Building a model of these types is an important part of language socialization as children `continually have to draw analogies from one situational context to another, and to determine how the situational context gives the form its particular meaning at that point' (105). These analogies themselves are diagrammatic icons: the similarities (or differences) in relations between elements in the current context and those in previous contexts encountered lead to similar (or different) understandings.
Moreover, analogy questions that call for the child to drawn on his or her experiences to deliver an open-ended response are the kind of question most frequently asked of preschoolers in Trackton (105). Imagic and metaphoric icons, both formulaic and otherwise, are common parts of adult discourse. For example (106, my emphasis outside of slashes):
Ted: I hear Doug got hisself a new car.
Cuz: Yea, he total his las' one.
Ted: What'd he git dis time.
Cuz: Ya know Robert's car? /looking at Ted/
//Ted gives an affirmative nod//
It's like dat, `cept red.

Children in Trackton are keenly aware of iconicity. Even `preverbal but mobile children, upon seeing a new object, often go and get another which is similar' (106). Older children spontaneously comment on things that are like others, pointing out `"Robert's car'" or `"'nother Hardee's'" while on drives (106).
The importance of context in Trackton, and the way meaning (or even what something is perceived as) is dependent on context, affects interpretation of written text, as briefly mentioned with the example of the transposition of `Kellogg's' above. Text that is presented in a typeface, location, or position other than that in which it is usually encountered inhibits interpretation. This context dependence prevents Trackton children from transferring skills and knowledge previously learned between contexts (192).
Although Heath does not describe it as such, she performs an informal neo-Whorfian experiment akin to those of John Lucy. On the functional level, which `concerns whether using language in a particular way (e.g. schooled) may influence thinking' (Lucy 1997: 292), her trial is essentially a test of how Trackton children perceive things to be iconic of each other. She asks the children to group together wooden blocks that are `alike', and the children invariably first separate out pieces with small amounts of glue on them. When asked to sort them further, they distinguish between darker or lighter grains for both the glued and non-glued pieces (Heath 1983: 107). Interestingly, they pay no attention to size and shape characteristics, counter to what might be expected from Lucy's comparative study on Yucatec and English (1992, cited in Foley 1997: 209-211).

Iconicity in Roadville
Iconic language use in Roadville varies greatly from that in Trackton. Whereas ideologies of iconicity in Trackton are focused on context, practices in Roadville are more text-centric. In summarizing how Roadville children's language use is like their parents', Heath lists three features, all of which are related to iconicity: Roadville children and parents `report exactly how something is said, maintain a single consistent label for items and events, and render stories in absolute chronological order with direct discourse' (165).
`Report exactly how something is said': all reported speech is to be delivered as an icon on two counts. Signs should be tokens of the same type (imagic iconicity) as those being reported, and those signs should be recounted in the same order as originally delivered (diagrammatic iconicity). `Maintain a single consistent label for items and events': a picture of a dog in a book is a `dog', not a `mutt' or `hound dog' or the name of a specific dog, like `Blackie', unless that label has previously been specified as the `right' one (227). In nursery school, children used to their teacher inviting them to `"work with playdough"' will correct a substitute teacher inviting them to `"play with clay"' (165). `Render stories in absolute chronological order with direct discourse': a story should essentially be a diagrammatic icon of a real-life event, with all its parts recounted in the proper order.
The kind of teaching Roadville children encounter in church is iconic of that in the home (and vice versa), reinforcing the same kinds of memorization and labeling patterns. The practices valued in church are the abilities to memorize and recite passages, books, characters, dates, and places from the Bible (140). This kind of fixed knowledge exhibited through exact repetition is precisely what is also valued in Roadville. Even the stories told in Roadville are iconic of Bible parables, sharing such features as moralizing summations, little emotional evaluation, and formulaic openings (154).

Iconicity in School
In school, teachers judge their students on the basis of implicit models for correct behavior and speech. When students deliver performances that are iconic of these models (i.e. tokens of these types), they are judged positively. As mentioned above, children from both Roadville and Trackton come to school with a repertoire different from that expected by the school, and their performances are often judged negatively. Heath focuses heavily on oral and written stories presented by students, and diagrams the features valued for both fictive and nonfictive stories in the school, and those for stories from Roadville (nonfictive only) and Trackton (`modified nonfictive'), in a chart (295).
In preschool, Roadville and Trackton children encounter many indirect questions from teachers that model their teachers' models for politeness, but not their own (279-80). Because they have never encountered questions comparable to these in their home settings, their lack of a type-level understanding makes it impossible for these children to follow the rules indirectly referred to by these questions. Although Roadville children are accustomed to time-delimited tasks such as they encounter in preschool, Trackton children are not. When they finish tasks early, or wish to continue them for a longer period of time, they become frustrated (275)
The difficulties Trackton children have with decontextualization and recontextualization make learning to read particularly challenging, but one first-grade teacher, Mrs. Gardner, uses Heath's ethnographic data to build lessons that work with these children's strengths. Instead of beginning to teach reading based on sounding out elements, she emphasizes the shape of words (286), drawing on the strength of Trackton children's visual acuity (106). Heath details other such teaching strategies that emphasize the strengths students bring to the classroom and that make learning activities relevant to the contexts of their lives in the last chapter of her ethnography, which inspire hope that creative and innovative teachers might be able to overcome some of the difficulties failure-track students encounter in schools.
Linguistic Anthropology Needs Iconicity
Iconicity is not constrained to the language of Trackton and Roadville; it pervades all speech. Any discussion of context is essentially one of iconicity, comparing one set of circumstances to those previously encountered, building models or types of contexts. Whenever communication between people speaking `the same language' fails, it should be to iconicity, and not indexicality, that analysts first turn: interactional participants fail to recognize the context recognized by the other, to know how to speak and act in a given context, or perceive the context as tokens of different types. These are issues first and foremost of similarity (or lack thereof), of iconicity.
In this review of Shirley Heath's ethnography of communication, Ways with Words, I have tried to give it a fair reading, pointing out how it could have been connected to larger class concerns, but generally appreciating its detailed presentation of the gestalt of two small Piedmont Carolina communities, Roadville and Trackton, and their language socialization practices. Because of the unusual connections Heath had with these communities and their especially centralized natures, a comparable ethnography will be difficult to find. The contributions Heath makes to education studies and linguistic anthropology, however, lie less in the specifics of her ethnography and more in its general focus. For education studies, she shows that thorough ethnographic research methods can be applied to increase the success of children in school. For linguistic anthropology, Ways with Words tacitly demands an invigorated emphasis on iconicity. It could be possible to critique my review on the basis of focusing on iconicity to the exclusion of indexicality; however, my goal is not to dismiss the importance of indexicality, but to assert the importance of a ground that has been recently neglected: iconicity.


Works Cited
William Foley, Ed. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. Massachusetts:
Blackwell Publishing.

Shirley Heath. 1983. Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

John Lucy. 1997. `Linguistic Relativity' in Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 26.

Teaching in a high school with a large number of minority children can be challenging. After reading this book, recommended by the debate teacher, I feel that I am better prepared. This book is an excellent resource for those wanting to understand the student from a background different form their own. If you plan to work in public school, this book is a must-read. I borrowed a friend's book, and then decided I had to have a copy of my own.

As a graduate student in English, I am not one who wanted to take any courses on rhetoric and composition. I signed up for one class this semester that focused on literacy and race. This book was a required reading. I was actually one of the only students who liked this book. Heath immerses herself in the communities of Trackton and Roadville. As an instructor of some of the local teachers, she decided to look into the literacy learning of these two communities. Trackton, an all black community, consists of people reading to learn. In Roadville, the all-white community is struggling with desegregation and parents wanting their children to learn the "right" things. The study of the Piedmont Carolinas--the area where the two communities are located--is important because it specifies that culture has everything to do with the way language and literacy is learned. I give it four stars because in the course of a ten year study, it did not seem as if she gathered a lot of research. She seemed to focus only on their lifestyles.

Language is power. Heath, a reflective practitioner of both human nature and schooling, provides an in-depth view of communities which epitomize the struggle for such power. In her ethnographic study of Trackton and Roadville, Heath lays bare the socializing process of children through words. The discontinuity between home and school is disturbing; a realization that students who do not fit the traditional way of schooling are left behind. Clearly illustrated is the need for teachers and students to bridge the gap which exists in relation to both language and culture, for without this effort some students will never acquire the power needed to take control of their education or pursue opportunities from which they have previously been excluded. This is must reading for student ethnographers, doctoral students, and those dedicated to school reform, particularly those in the areas of diversity in public schools, and language. This extraordinary book compares favorably to "Growing Up Literate: Learning From Inner-City Families" by Denny Taylor & Catherine Dorsey-Gaines.

Hi, My name is@Hiromi and I just moved to the US this July@from Japan. Now I study English with this book. This book is good for me because:
1.@It is very easy to understand.
2. It is a very good level for me.
3.@The pages are colorful and fun to read.
As you can see, I highly recommend this book to you.

The service is faster I received the book in 3 days before the promise date..Very good service...

This is a very useful book for beginners. The topics are contemporary, the pictures are engaging, and it's not overwhelming for new students who don't want to be scared away. I have book number 4.

Excellent book for beginning English students. The material is presented logically, leads to great discussion topics and is useful for real life encounters.

I was from China and started my life in the USA as a graduate student in Engineering. Although I took the TOEFL before I came to USA, my English is not good enough to express myself clearly and accurately. I decided to improve my English about 4 months ago and started to borrow some ESL books from local libraries.

About 2 weeks ago, I found four "Side by Side" books (Book 1 to Book 4) from a local library and borrowed them. Now I am working on the Book 3 and I have enjoyed every book. I believe that "Side by Side" Book 1 to Book 4 will make very good textbooks for ESL (or ESOL) programs.

My item arrived in a fair amount of time and the book is decent. It is broken up in to different categories and some words are repeated in more than 1 section, but with alternate meanings. Not bad at all . . .

Barron's series Mastering Vocabulary is a great tool for language learners! As another reviewer points out, this is not a book for teaching yourself grammar. It is, though, a great way to move on from knowing the basics to being competent in the language.

Using a normal course, such as one in the Colloqial series, you will end up with knowing the grammar relatively well and with a vocabulary of 1500 words. That's a good start, but you need to know more words to get moving. The Mastering Vocabulary series is a great help along the way. By doing one chapter each week, you will know more than 7000 words after half a year. That is enough to live in a language where the language is spoken and use it in all everyday interactions and communication. My only real complaint with the series is that it's not available for more than four languages.

This is a great book to have if you're also pairing it with Breaking out of Beginner's Spanish, or something along that lines. Not for the one who is looking to buy Spanish for Dummies. However, it's categorized well, and very logical in its presentation.

If you ARE beginning Spanish study, this is a little too detailed for you. Get the major verb tenses and conjugations down first, and then buy this book after at least a year of class or self-study.

This is laid out for the older student - upper high school and adults. For the much younger student, Flip Flop Spanish is a good one for a simple approach as well.

Sra. Gose
Author of Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 1 & Flip Flop Spanish: Ages 3-5: Level 2

As the editor of the Learning Spanish Products Reviews (LearningSpanishProductsReviews) site, one of my responsibilities is to review learning-Spanish resources. I am also a native Spanish speaker from Argentina, and a professional private Spanish instructor. In addition, I am the author of two learning-Spanish products offered here at Amazon:

1. Anna Rivera's 1000 Plus Most Powerful Spanish Words

2. Anna Rivera's 800 Plus Most Powerful Spanish Phrases


MSV uses a very novel approach to teaching vocabulary. Instead of giving the student a long list of vocabulary words and instructing the student to memorize the words, MSV groups Spanish words and phrases according to 24 different themes that the reader is likely to encounter in everyday life.

The themes that are covered include:

a. Personal Information
b. Human Body
c. Health and Medicine
d. Mental Processes and states
e. Shopping, eating, drinking and clothing
f. Living arrangements
g. Private life, social relations
h. Education, school, university
i. Occupation and the job world
j. Leisure time
k. Travel and tourism
l. Visual arts, music, literature
m. History, religion
n. Government, science, Politics
o. Business and the economy
p. Communications and Mass Media
q. Traffic, Transportation
s. Nature, Environment, and Ecology
t. Time and space
u. colors and shapes
v. General concepts
w. Structural words
x. Americanisms

If you include the various subthemes that this book covers, you can say that this book easily covers about 100 different vocabulary topics consisting of over 9,500 useful terms. One of the strong points of this book is that it sometimes covers both the Latin American vocabulary word and the European Spanish vocabulary word. This can be very helpful especially for the traveler that travels to Latin America and Spain or the student interested in learning the Spanish that is spoken in the Americas as well as Europe. Here's an example straight from MSV:

el duranzo - el melocoton - peach
la banana - el platano - banana


(I have intentionally omitted any accent marks because they sometimes appear as strange characters on my Amazon reviews).

In terms of content, MSV is well-deserving of 5 stars. The only issue I have with this book is that it does not provide the student with the tools to retain the 9,500 plus words and phrases. Without visual or audio aids the student may have some difficulty retaining the over 9,500 words and phrases. But MSV is such a comprehensive Spanish vocabulary book with a such an inexpensive price tag, that I still must give it 5 stars and recommend it to the beginner, intermediate, and advanced student seeking to increase her vocabulary.

I have to admit that I've never had a Spanish lesson in my life, but I would really like to learn it, at least well enough to read Spanish books and magazines. While I've had French and have done considerable reading recently in that language, I have not had any serious exposure to Spanish vocabularly, so I purchased this volume to assist in developing a basic vocabularly. While I find it a little daunting, I'm surprised at how much I've been able to learn. The book is arranged in a manner that presents primarily nouns and adjectives in logical classes. The reader learns a word and its meaning and then sees how it is used in a sentance, thereby passively learning something of sentance structure and other word forms like verbs and adverbs. I find this method works well for me, because I really am a noun-adjective person more than a verb-adverb person. I can remember the concrete more thoroughly than I can actions and ideas, probably because I'm a visual person--not to mention a not very active one. I've purchased several children's books in Spanish: Lemony Snicket, Harry Potter, and the Spiderwich Chronicals, and in my attempts to read them, I can actually see progress being made. I'm quite pleased.