[Words Count cover]

Words Count

1st edition, 2005, now available

Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin Company
222 Berkeley Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02116-3764

ISBN: 0-618-25861-2

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Words Count offers a contextual approach to vocabulary building. Each chapter introduces ten new words linked by a common thread such as money, marriage, or friendship. This thematic approach to learning new words helps students to make connections among the 250 words introduced in the text.

Those connections, in turn, make the word meanings easier to learn and to remember. Like its more advanced sister text, Words Matter, Words Count offers specific strategies for learning and remembering each new word.

Features:

  • Pre- and Post-Tests: Every chapter ends with pre- and post-tests that make it easy for students to chart their progress..
  • Abundant Practice: Each chapter offers four different types of exercises ranging from multiple choice and matching to true or false and fill-in-the-blanks.
  • Controlled Sequence of Exercises: The exercises have been sequenced so that students move from the more cognitively simple, like multiple choice and matching, to exercises that require more complex kinds of thinking such as labeling statements true or false, e.g., "An extravagant person always buys on sale."
  • Memory Pegs: The entry for each word includes a specific strategy for ensuring long-term remembering.
  • Expanded Context: Because clues to unfamiliar words often come from the whole passage rather than just a single sentence, every chapter contains two extended readings that require students to fill in the blanks.
  • Common Idioms: Each chapter contains one or two related idioms. The chapter titled "Money Talk," for example, introduces the two idiomatic expressions "in the red" and "in the black."
  • Numerous Chances for Review: Words introduced in one chapter reappear in later ones so that students have plenty of chances to see the same word in a number of different contexts.
  • Mastery Tests: Fill-in-the-blank tests for each set of ten words are available in the instructor's manual.
  • Vocabulary Enrichment Exercises for Reading CD-Rom: This CD-Rom consists of 90 tests, with 10 questions per test, providing a total of 900 vocabulary questions in matching, multiple choice, fill-in-sentence, and fill in paragraph forms.
  • Complementary Text: Words Matter, which can be used on its own or as a follow-up text to Words Count.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage for Vocabulary Building
Chapter 2: Character Comments
Chapter 3: Character Comments II
Chapter 4: Words for Thought
Chapter 5: Honorable and Dishonorable Mention
Chapter 6: Money Talk
Chapter 7: Timely Words
Chapter 8: More Timely Words
Chapter 9: Keeping Secrets
Chapter 10: Hiding Out
Chapter 11: Expressions of Approval and Disapproval
Chapter 12: Beginnings and Endings
Chapter 13: Crime and Punishment
Chapter 14: Lifelines
Chapter 15: On the Move
Chapter 16: Body language
Chapter 17: Words on Words
Chapter 18: More Words on Words
Chapter 19: Together and Apart
Chapter 20: Getting Mad, Making Up
Chapter 21: Friends and Enemies
Chapter 22: Talking of Love and Marriage
Chapter 23: Words with a Story
Chapter 24: Speaking of Government
Chapter 25: Fiery Words
Chapter 26: The Language of Humor


Last update of this page: August 13, 2004

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