Personal Best
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Hours per week 90-120
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Levels 6
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American English
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Personal Best is a six-level General English course for today’s busy young adults who want to maximize their English language learning experience.
Developed with series editor Jim Scrivener, internationally renowned teacher trainer and presenter, Personal Best brings together a focus on practice as a driver of improvement and a 21st-century course package with an integrated web-based video show and the Personal Best Language App.
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Sample unit
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Scope & sequence
With Personal Best, students will:
- Grammar is presented in stand-alone lessons, separate from skills work.
- The pronunciation syllabus focuses on connected speech to help students recognize and produce language.
- Lexis is prioritized, with two or more vocabulary sets per unit, and incorporated into discussions and other tasks.
- As part of a comprehensive skills syllabus, reading and listening skills pages develop learner skills and strategies.
- Students can apply selected functional language to improve specific speaking or writing skills.
- Speaking and writing activities have clear task goals and cumulative aims.
Components and resources
Student’s Book
Workbook
Language App
RLP
Learn more about Personal Best: Student’s Book
The Personal Best Student’s Book is divided into separate language and skills lessons so that students can focus on the new grammar and lexis, without having to struggle through long reading or listening texts. Each level has a comprehensive skills syllabus, with a particular emphasis on speaking and writing. Clear Builder and Skills boxes allow students to see exactly which skills are being focused on and the extended practice section at the back of the book offers further practice on grammar, vocabulary and communication.
Approach to Language teaching: A and C Lessons
Lessons A and C always focus on Language. They cover grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation and use accessible, graded texts or audio to contextualize the language point. There is an emphasis on practice via clearly staged activities with additional practice in the Grammar Practice, Vocabulary Practice, and Communication Practice sections, the Personal Best Language App, the Workbook, and the Richmond Learning Platform.
Approach to Skills teaching: B Lessons
Each B and D lesson focuses on development of one of the four skills: reading, listening, writing, or speaking. Each B lesson focuses on one of the receptive skills, i.e., listening or reading. The listening lessons feature a video webshow named Learning Curve. The listening and reading lessons feature Skill, Text builder, and Listening builder boxes.
Approach to Skills teaching: D Lessons
Each B and D lesson focuses on development of one of the four skills: reading, listening, writing, or speaking. Each D lesson focuses on one of the productive skills, i.e., speaking or writing. The speaking lessons feature a video webshow named Learning Curve. The writing and speaking lessons feature Skill, Text builder and Conversation builder boxes. The D lessons bring together the language and skills practiced in the unit in a supported Personal Best productive task.
Review and Practice
There are six Review and Practice sections that review grammar, vocabulary, and functional language across units. They use a variety of exercises and end with a short, fun Personal Best section that allows for language recall in a more productive way.
Learn more about Personal Best: Workbook
The Workbook provides a page of practice for each Student’s Book lesson and an additional Review and Practice spread to review the content from the entire unit.
The Workbook offers comprehensive self-study practice of the language and skills taught in the Student’s Book.
It provides practice not only of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation but for all four skills—reading, listening, writing, and speaking—for the corresponding Student’s Book lessons. The audio is available as MP3 download on the Richmond Learning Platform.
The Review and Practice section features podcasts and blogs from the Learning Curve team. This section reviews the language taught in the unit and provides further listening and reading practice.
Learn more about Personal Best: Language App
The Personal Best Language App offers free, self-study practice of the language content from the Student’s Book. Grammar and vocabulary are the main focus, although pronunciation is also incorporated. The App includes accompanying audio and images from the Student’s Book. Each level of the course has a corresponding App. This provides further optional self-study practice of the grammar and vocabulary of that level.
Learn more about Personal Best: RLP
The Richmond Learning Platform complements the practice offered in the Workbook and on the Personal Best Language App with extra practice activities, a forum, messaging and storage areas, and a powerful and ground-breaking test management system.
Students can practice all the language and skills from the Student’s Book on the platform and receive instant feedback. They can try exercises up to three times to learn from their mistakes.
Teacher’s Book
Resource Book
RLP
Audio/Video
Digital Book
Learn more about Personal Best: Teacher’s Book
The Teacher’s Book is a comprehensive, full-color resource that incorporates the complete Student’s Book. It provides all the necessary procedural guidance to teach the Student’s Book lessons as well as extra ideas to extend and support students. There is a unique 3xPractice feature for each lesson to help teachers and students go deeper into the activities and experiment with forms and meanings. It also contains a unique 3xPractice feature, with extra ideas on how to repeat and extend selected activities. This encourages students to play around with the new language and experiment with forms and meanings, helping them memorise and personalise the information. Further teacher support includes Teacher Training videos featuring Jim Scrivener and practising teachers from the Bell School, Cambridge. These can be accessed through the Richmond Learning Platform.
Each full-sized, color Student’s Book page is next to its accompanying teaching notes.
There is an accessible easy-to-use warm-up activity at the start of each lesson to interest and engage students in the topic.
3xPractice boxes encourage students to engage more deeply with the language in three steps.
Personal Best boxes provide activities for weaker students. They are easy for teachers to set up and for individual students to work through by themselves.
Questions to check understanding ensure that students have understood the grammar teaching point, or the text builder / listening builder/ conversation builder language presented in the lesson.
Extra Practice activities offer ideas for further extending and exploiting the topic and language or skill of the lesson.
Learn more about Personal Best: Resource Book
The Teacher’s Resource Book provides extensive photocopiable materials and unit tests. The photocopiable activities can be used as a change of focus or used to review at a later stage. The unit tests help with recall and provide a sense of progress. There are photocopiable activities for grammar, vocabulary, and skills.
Learn more about Personal Best: RLP
The Richmond Learning Platform complements the practice offered in the Workbook and on the Personal Best Language App with extra practice activities, a forum, messaging and storage areas, and a powerful and ground-breaking test management system.
Teachers can track students’ progress and level of self-study activity and assign ready-made activities from the platform or their own tailored tasks. A set of sophisticated tools enable teachers to see at a glance how students are progressing and to analyze and compare the progress made by individual students and groups.
There is a full range of downloadable editable or print-and-go resources, including the worksheets and progress tests from the Teacher’s Resource Book, audio scripts, wordlists, and answer keys. Teachers have their own cloud storage area and can share activities from there with their students.
Testing
The Richmond Test Bank offers ready-made interactive, editable, or PDF tests, and the Test Manager enables teachers to create their own interactive or printed tests from a wide range of activities and tailor them to their students’ needs.
Learn more about Personal Best: Audio/Video
The Audio and Video pack includes the Class Audio CDs and Class Video DVDs. All audio and video is also available to download from the Richmond Learning Platform.
Learn more about Personal Best: Digital Book
This is a complete projectable digital resource for the teacher: it provides the Student’s Book in digital format with embedded audio, video, scripts, notes and answers, for use with a smart board or projector.
