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9781859644768

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Take-off: Technical English for Engineering describes itself as an ESP course for intermediate-level students. It is particularly aimed at 'technicians and engineers who are going on to work in the aeronautics industry' but would also be useful for anyone heading in the mechanical engineering direction. Students heading for civil, chemical and electrical engineering, however, may well be turned off by the aeronautical examples and the strong mechanical bias. The text is also based on the premise that English teachers may have little or no technical background knowledge of engineering, so authentic texts have been modified to make them more accessible, and tasks are designed to focus on language development, not technical understanding. As a core text for students entering the aeronautics industry it works well, having a strong practical emphasis and a clear goal of enabling students to function well in the training and work environment. Since listening is a critical skill for maintenance crew members, for example, there is a higher proportion of listening exercises than one would expect in a more general course book. The recordings introduce a number of regional English accents and some Australian and American accents, and the exercises for training students in listening strategies are well thought out. The reading and writing exercises are similarly well balanced, seeking to enable students to deal with texts that will be required in the workplace. The reading texts, for example, have a heavy focus on extracting data from dense technical texts, interpreting diagrams and labeled drawings, and working with bullet-pointed manual instructions, whilst the writing tasks include transferring data from listening text to pictures, from diagrams to instructions and filling in forms. The teacher's book and workbook are well-structured, and the teacher should be confidence that answers are comprehensively supplied, with explanation if necessary. The workbook provides welcome extra practice, and is clearly linked back to the course book. The glossary, word list and electrical symbols list at the back of the course book are a useful addition. Since we do not have students who are seeking to enter the aeronautics industry, but we do prepare students for entry into undergraduate and postgraduate engineering and physics programmes, we were interested to see whether we could use parts of this course to supplement our current texts and to expand our range of readings to suit the more technically-minded of our students. Texts of a suitable level on purely scientific matters can be difficult to find, and are a welcome addition to a portfolio of texts with an arts/commerce/environmental focus. Whilst this course is necessarily very rich in technical language, we nevertheless found a number of lessons - which were sufficiently general in terms of vocabulary to be relevant and useful to all students - on subjects such as robots, the power of water, skeletons, etc. and which could be easily exploited in the EAP classroom. All in all, whilst this text does have a limited audience, it is nevertheless one that we will find useful to keep on our shelf. Laura Hasely, in consultation with Peter Reynolds and Dr Alison Adams, Bridging Programmes, Universi

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David Morgan, BA Cert Ed., co-authored the Take-Off students book. He has spent most of his teaching career in Further Education and Industry, teaching general English, EFL and ESP. He has completed numerous specialist projects, such as teaching short courses to air traffic control personnel and producing a 200-hour intermediate ESP course for a leading Middle Eastern electricity supply company. Until 2003, he was in charge of the English Language programme at the on-site training centre of a major oil company in Libya, where national employees from all technical fields followed courses in General English and subject-specific ESP. During this time, he pioneered the establishment of the UCLES examinations in order to produce an externally validated objective yardstick by which courses and teaching could be judged. He has retired from full-time teaching but is still interested in working on materials writing and editing projects which involve producing reading and listening passages based on specific subject areas. Nicholas Regan is an ELT writer and teacher trainer. Since 2002, he has worked as an independent consultant for teacher development in the primary and secondary sectors, covering teaching in under-resourced and crowded classrooms, and working with Ministries of Education, Universities and schools in China, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and the EU. He has also been involved in the evaluation of state provision of English teaching. For several years he taught English at secondary school level in Latin America. For Garnet Education, he has co-authored the ESP course Take-Off, and has also contributed to ESAP: Mechanical Engineering, Progressive Skills in English, New Skills in English, UAE English Skills series and the English for Libya series. He has also written materials for ELT training at Diploma level. His other work includes examining and assessment design for ESOL teaching qualifications; pre- and in-service training; and supervision of dissertations for MA TESOL students at the University of Birmingham. He holds the Trinity College London LTCL DipTESOL and an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading, UK.

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