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Personal Best

  • Hours per week 90-120

  • Levels 6

  • American English

  • video thumbnail

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.

A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2

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 PracticeVocabulary 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 SkillText 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.

ISBN

For Students A1 Beginner A2 Elementary B1 Pre-Intermediate B1+ Intermediate B2 Upper Intermediate C1 Advanced
Student’s Book 9788466828574 9788466827379 9788466827553 9788466827966 9788466821018 9788466825597
Workbook 9788466825740 9788466826396 9788466828895 9788466828444 9788466827430 9788466827614
Personal Best AM Digital E-SB 9788466834308 9788466834339 9788466834292 9788466834315 9788466834353 9788466834377
Personal Best AM Digital E-WB 9788466828475 9788466828956 9788466828376 9788466816960 9788466829908 9788466816939
Split Edition A1 Beginner A2 Elementary B1 Pre-Intermediate B1+ Intermediate B2 Upper Intermediate C1 Advanced
Split Edition A (SB & WB ) 9788466828888 9788466825535 9788466829403 9788466826501 9788466826525 9788466825542
Split Edition B (SB & WB) 9788466829359 9788466825955 9788466826907 9788466826488 9788466826310 9788466827416
Personal Best AM (ESB + EWB) Split A 9786070616754 9786070616778 9786070616792 9786070616815 9786070616839 9786070616853
Personal Best AM (ESB + EWB) Split B 9786070616761 9786070616785 9786070616808 9786070616822 9786070616846 9786070616860
Personal Best AM Dig ESB 1-5 Split A 9786070616884 ----- ----- ----- ----- 9786070616907
Personal Best AM Dig ESB 6-10 Split B 9786070616891 ----- ----- ----- ----- 9786070616914
Personal Best AM Dig ESB 1-6 Split A ----- 9786070616921 9786070616945 9786070616952 9786070616976 -----
Personal Best AM Dig ESB 7-12 Split B ----- 9786070616938 9786070616747 9786070616969 9786070616983 -----
For Teachers A1 Beginner A2 Elementary B1 Pre-Intermediate B1+ Intermediate B2 Upper Intermediate C1 Advanced
Teacher’s Book 9788466829007 9788466828741 9788466826723 9788466827638 9788466828451 9788466825832
Teacher’s Resources 9788466828673 9788466828109 9788466828161 9788466828222 9788466827331 9788466829816
Digital Book 9788466827898 9788466825733 9788466828130 9788466826051 9788466827690 9788466825665
Class Audio and Video Pack 9788466826198 9788466826273 9788466828949 9788466825498 9788466827065 9788466826730

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