General content
The book has paid sufficient attention to words and word study. There is no mistyped words, no grammatical error, and misused words. The words used in this book are appropriate to both the teachers and students.
Language is a tool used by society to communicate with one another. People acquire their L1 from their mother when they were a kid. English is taught in junior high school to prepare the students for the higher education. But more importantly, it is taught to make students understand and able to use English as means of communication.
With many reading, speaking and writing activities, this book has adequately address the students’ needs in learning English.
Most of the materials in the book are the things that students’ might have seen, or will likely see in their neighborhood. It is also contains the fresh contents. In other words, what students learn from this book are things that are really useful for them (contextual) and are up to date (current).
Having said that, the book is indeed lack of the special notation such as phonetic symbols, stress, and intonation marking. However, 7th grader students will not benefit much from such notation since they are still a beginner learner who learn through mimic and repetition rather than code-deciphering.
Quality of practice material
The majority of practice material in this book is good. They are in pictures and bubble speech asking the students to do something, whether to speak or to write. This can be really engaging for the students because it’s not like what we normally see in textbook.
Exercises are not presented explicitly. Almost in every page, we can find exercise presented in the bubble speeches as I mentioned above. Multiple choice which we normally find in most textbooks is not available in this book. In my opinion, this is much better, because students are challenged to actually use the language instead of just crossing a, b, c or d.
Having said that, the book indeed is lack of controlled exercise. However, the teacher’s book does contains the guidance on how to create the activities. The target languages are presented in examples, moving on to semi-controlled activities, and finished with free activities after the students are assumed to have understand how to use the target language.
There are no grammar formulas presented in the books. Looking at this fact, it is safe to state that the book adopts the inductive approach. Even though the learning process will take a longer time than the deductive approach. This is far better because students will understand the grammar longer and will be able to apply what they learn in real conversation. There are no review materials in the book. I believe by having the final project on each project is sufficient to determine whether the students have understand what they have taught.
Sequencing
No matter how the book is sequenced, the teacher can always jumbled the material suiting the students’ needs, the situation, the context, and the time. Teacher may teach the students the last chapter of the book in the first meeting if needed.
By grammatical structures, the book is sequenced in the following order:
Describing peoples’ job (she is a, he is a, he works at, she works at) and public places
Describing animals and what they do (Dog has fur, cat has fur, elephant is big, ant is small, cats eat fish) and also describing people’s characteristics.
Describing appearances (he is tall, she is beautiful, he is diligent, my mother likes reading novels)
Instruction and notice (don’t litter, no smoking, be quiet!)
By genre, the book is sequenced in the following order:
things around students (people, jobs, public places)
descriptive text (characteristics)
descriptive text
instruction
This book is not sequenced by language skills. The four language skills in English are integrated in every chapter. This is generally better than having to teach the students the four language skills in English separately.
Vocabulary
The vocabularies in the book mostly relevant with what students’ life. With my limited knowledge in words and word study, I am confident to say that there is no mistyped or incorrectly spelled word in the books.
The book contains vocabularies which are relevant to the students’ life. It is either the things that they have seen or the things they will see. There are no out of context vocabularies. Most of textbooks created these days are copy-paste material from other books used in other countries. In those books words like hamburger, sandwich, hotdog etc. These words are not written in this book, which is good because students will unlikely found them in their life.
Students will find some vocabularies repeated throughout the semester. Words like, father, mother and their jobs are found throughout the semester. This way, they will be able to remember it for a much longer tim