The Big Picture is a highly visual, stimulating, six-level course for adult and young adult learners of English, offering 90 to 120 hours of core classroom material, complemented by a wealth of digital and print resources. The second edition of the course keeps the core approach of the original edition, with real-life, international contexts combined with striking images to engage students. Carefully graded activities give students the support they need to express themselves with confidence.
The Big Picture is about real life. The course aims to make English language learning accessible by grounding tasks in real-life situations. The course also challenges stereotyping and presents positive role models in all of the content. The lesson topics take global situations and cultural material which are both stimulating and immediately relevant to students’ lives. Due to the growing importance of images in today’s digitalized world, we’re all becoming more visually literate. Therefore, images in the course aren’t merely decorative, but play an active role in the learning process. They are used to engage students and develop critical thinking skills by encouraging them not only to describe images, but also to interpret and discuss them.
With The Big Picture 2nd Edition students will:
complete speaking or writing output tasks, which ensure they personalize the target language and make it relevant to them.
develop specific receptive skills to ensure they can interpret texts in English and convey meaning to others.
complete mediation tasks, which them practice in conveying information to others, an important part of the latest CEFR.
be exposed to various styles of video and real-life English, which stimulate conversation and critical thinking.
Ben has taught English for over twenty years in the UK, Spain and Hong Kong and currently teaches on The New School’s online MATESOL program (New York). He is lead author of the adult coursebook series ‘New Framework’ and ‘New American Framework’ (Richmond) and the forthcoming series ‘The Big Picture’ (Richmond). He is also the co-author of ‘English Unlimited Advanced’ (Cambridge) and has published the teachers’ methodology handbook ‘Working with Images’ (Cambridge). His main interests lie in intercultural issues, images and video and English as an International Language.
Ceri Jones has been working in ELT since 1986. She has worked as a teacher, trainer and educational manager in Italy, Hungary, Spain and the UK. She has been involved in materials writing since the mid 1990s and has written for a number of coursebook series, including Richmond’s Framework and The Big Picture, as well as writing grammar practice books and a range of supplementary material both on and offline. She is interested in integrating web 2.0 tools in the low-tech classroom and especially in the use and exploitation of images. She is based in the south of Spain where she currently works as a freelance writer, teacher and trainer.
