London (Oxford Bookworms Factfiles)

London—two thousand years of history. From the Romans and King Henry the Eighth to the city of today and tomorrow—and from St Paul's Cathedral and Buckingham Palace to Petticoat Lane and Ronnie Scott's Jazz club.

London is a book in the Factfiles series. Factfiles, as you may know, is a sub-series of Oxford Bookworms. London is a Stage 1 book.

The book is divided into nine chapters. Each chapter consists of two facing pages, with the exception of Chapter 1, which is an introductory chapter of only one page. The nine chapters are: This is London!; In the Beginning; Visiting the City; Some Places to Go; Westminster; Shops and Eating; Going Out; Museums and Galleries; and Places and Parades. These nine chapters are followed by a map and, as with other Factfiles books, some exercises and a glossary.

The language, as one would expect with a Stage 1 book, is quite simple, the only difficult feature being the large number of proper nouns, unavoidable in a book introducing a city. Sentences tend to be quite short and simple. For example, the 14 sentences on page 2 have the following lengths (numbers of words): 7, 17, 8, 15, 5, 16, 6, 21, 12, 25, 6, 10, 7, and 14. This yields a mean of 12.07 words per sentence. The general pattern appears to be a short sentence followed by a longer one. Looking more closely at the longer sentences, we can see that many are composed of two independent clauses joined by the conjunctions "but" or "and". If we count these as separate sentences, we get a new mean sentence length of 9.75 words. To cut a long story short, it is unlikely that any students would be overwhelmed with the difficulty of this book.

The most interesting chapters for me were those with some connection with history, particularly Chapter 2 (In the Beginning), Chapter 4 (Some Places to Go), and Chapter 5 (Westminster). Chapter 2 looks back over 2000 years of history:

The Romans came to England in AD43. They built houses and other buildings and made a town next to the River Thames.

This was followed five hundred years later by a Danish invasion, but

King Alfred was king of England then. He got the Danes to leave London and his men built the town again.

 

Ireland

Oxford Bookworms Factfiles is a sub-series in the Oxford Bookworms series. It is devoted to nonfiction, and most of the books are about countries or famous cities or environmental problems. 

The book I read today is Ireland. Generally, the book is quite easy to read. There are few embedded clauses, and the sentences are simple in structure. The average sentence length is about 10 words. There are some much longer sentences, but most of those are lists or have easy-to-understand clauses such as "because" clauses. The vocabulary is quite simple, with few unknown words that learners will need to look up in the dictionary. But the books do have quite a lot of information and the number of words is fairly large. Thus, these books are recommended for learners who are aiming to progress beyond very short and simple books such as Usborne First Reading or Oxford Reading Tree.

The book consists of ten chapters: A strange and interesting country; Around the island; The Irish church and people; The English come to Ireland; Death from hunger; Fighting to be free; Northern Ireland; Dublin; Stories, music and dancing; and A country for young people.

Chapter 2, Around the island, describes the geography of Ireland. Most of the mountains in Ireland are near the sea [rewrite], and the chapter explains that the middle of the island has many beautiful lakes and rivers. The north and west of Ireland are mountainous, so most of the farming happens in the middle and east. Ireland is famous for its meat and milk. "There are hundreds of small islands in the sea around Ireland." (p. 2)

[chapter 2 summary]

For me, one of the most interesting chapters was Chapter 3, The Irish church and people. Living in Japan, it is sometimes difficult to understand the importance of religion in people's daily lives in the Catholic country of Ireland.

Overall, the book was very interesting and useful for me. My knowledge of Ireland was very limited, and the book gave me lots of useful information and made me want to visit Ireland myself. As mentioned above, this book and other books in the Factfiles sub-series may be a useful next step for learners who have read mainly very simple books.

[368 words]