Title: The Series, Critical Thinking

Reading, Thinking, and Reasoning Skills

Publisher:  Steck-Vaughn Company, Austin, Texas

Appropriate learner levels:  The book “Orange Level” is appropriate for learners with a basic English vocabulary.  The “Red Level” is appropriate for learners of the intermediate level, and the “Green Level” is for advanced learners.

Description:  Generally speaking, the list of contents and relevant skills applied from Unit 1 through Unit 4 are similar.  The differences are: (1). There are additional units titled Synthesizing and Evaluation for the red and green levels; (2). The degree of difficulty applied at the orange level has obviously intensified at the green level.  The book, ”Critical Thinking for Adults”, provides learners with relevant exercises to pass from the intermediate (red) level through the advanced (green) level.

Goals and Objectives: The series of books provides learners with the opportunity to train their abilities at classifying, comparing, identifying, ordering, estimating, judging, drawing conclusions, making decisions, inferring and building hypotheses.

Strengths:  (1).The usage of pictures in the contents might get learners interested in thinking and in completing their writing.  (2). The series involves a systematic introduction to the technique of thinking through engagement with different topics.

Weaknesses:  Learners might have difficulties with describing and writing if there are some vocabulary words they do not know.  No answer keys are listed in the back of each book to provide learners with proper reference.

Why selected:  I’d like to use this series as teaching materials for students in Taiwan.  English education in Taiwan has always focused on grammar.  Taiwanese students perhaps learn a lot about the English grammar, but they are not capable of expressing their ideas well in English.  This series of Critical Thinking can be useful application means to help students at different levels to organize their ideas and to express themselves in English as a second language.

附註: 以上是我早先寫的一篇評述, 謹此作為大家參考!  本文目前同步張貼於筆者之UDN網路社團:Literacy Club.  如果有網友找到如此系列的書籍, 尚祈不吝指正, 讓我有所學習.