This concerns the new Penguin Student Edition - Rated 
Penguin Books has just launched a new collection of classics for students. Short works with an introduction, systematic line numbering, a set of language notes and of follow up activities for each chapter, a set of further general questions on the whole book, a presentation of each character, a summary of the chapters, a short bibliography and a CD with a set of excerpts from the book read by a professional actor. This enables the students, and the teachers, to work in depth on the work, and to have a contact with the text both in writ and in voice. This is a good tool for students, particularly foreign students learning English, because it enables them to read the book, to have a wide variety of helping tools and activities and also to listen to the text and hence learn how to read the text. This audio CD is essential because many foreign students of English have great difficuly at capturing oral language, hence at producing oral language. It enables them particularly, for those who are even more or less blocked in that competence, to read along first, then to close the book and to listen to the text as many times as possible and to transcribe what they hear, little by little and then to check how much they do understand. A fair proportion of secondary education students have that problem and this activity is probably the best way to solve it (provided of course their hearing has been checked and there is no other interference from another problem such as a badly negociated bilingual situation in their environment). The great advantage of this new collection is that Penguin Books has decided to upgrade traditional approaches and to drop the audio tape which is very difficult to manage and use an audio CD which is so user-friendly for navigation. It is a very good idea. The works in this collection are also well chosen for young people or even old teenagers. They are thought-provoking and challenging in their contents for this new generation of students who want to recognize issues they know in their everyday life because they too often syncretically project their own direct experience into what they discover. It is natural but in the younger generation it has become a real way of life, way of thinking, everyday and common behaviour. This is probably a general human attitude, but it is all the more pregnant and heavy in the modern generation because of the impact of zapping on modern media, which produces an exploded and syncretic vision of the world, and because of the « tribal » approach of life with the splitting of the whole youth into groups that identify themselves and one another by the language, the dressing styles, the music they listen to, the entertainment they practice, the various existential elements in their lives. Each young person belongs or does not belong to this or that group. This produces the requirement and the method of those young people to compare what they are proposed to what they consider as their identity. Animal Farm for instance shows them a tribal world divided in tribal groups, even if it was thought by the author, at the time of the writing, as a class society, and a denunciation of the naroow-minded class approach of the stalinists : a denunciation of the soviet society, that had little to do with the ideal of socialism and communism, and a lot to do with feudal tribalism. A very good experiment and initiative from Penguin Books. But we are quite used to such initiative coming from Penguin Books who have always been at the spearhead of innovation. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
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