Advanced Learners

Abstract

Advanced Learners is a new resource book published by Oxford University Press in the well-established Resource Books for Teachers series. It aims at English language learners at C1 and C2 levels (Common European Framework of Reference). It is relatively rare that a resource book is devoted to students at one level only. More commonly, such publications (see this and other resource book series) focus on a concrete ELT area, for example Vocabulary (Morgan and Rinvolucri 2004, second edition), and Grammar (Thornbury 2005), or are addressed to an age group, for example Teenagers (Lewis 2007). In these ‘finely tuned’ resource books, only some of the activities are suitable for high-level students, and the teacher of advanced learners has to sieve through all the material to find something suitable for C1/C2 learners or heavily adapt the activities hoping that after some changes they will work for advanced students. (Naturally, as in every experiment the outcome is uncertain.) To be fair, resource books do include activities labelled ‘pre-intermediate and above’, suggesting these activities can be done with high-level students. Yet, in my experience, they do not stretch the learners enough, and even if exclusively labelled ‘advanced’, they rank in the lower band of the advanced level. For all these reasons, advanced learners deserve full attention in a resource book just as lower levels have been catered for, in for example Beginners (Grundy 1994, in this series). This book fills the gap.