Welcome,

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve either bought, or are contemplating buying this book.

Either way, thank you.

As with all Language Gym books, our small team has gone to great efforts to produce a high-quality, affordable, no-frills resource. Feedback from the three international and three UK-based schools on the content of this book has been overwhelmingly positive. As with our previous publications, the evidence shows that the EPI method really does produce excellent results. As a full-time teacher who uses these resources across all levels they teach, Dylan can also vouch for the method first-hand. We know that the care taken throughout the creation process will reflect in the quality of the resource and do hope that you and your students enjoy using it!

This book is meant as a revision resource for GCSE German. It can be used independently by students as well as for teacher-directed classroom practice. It contains 12 units which focus mainly on the following themes: "Environment, Health and Career".

Each unit consists of a knowledge organiser recapping the target sentence patterns and lexical items, a series of receptive vocab-building activities; a set of narrow reading texts and activities; a set of translation tasks. The tasks are graded in order to pose an increasingly demanding but manageable cognitive load and challenge and are based on Dr Conti’s P.I.P.O. framework:

Pre-reading tasks (activation of prior knowledge and pre-teaching)

In-reading tasks (intensive exploitation of tasks)

Post-reading tasks (consolidation)

Output (pushed-output tasks)

Consistent with Dr Conti’s E.P.I. approach, each of the 12 units in the book provide extensive recycling of the target lexical items both within each unit and throughout the book, across all the dimensions of receptive and productive processing, i.e.: orthography (single letters and syllables), lexis (both words and chunks), grammar/syntax (with much emphasis on functional and positional processing), meaning and discourse. The recycling occurs through input-flooding and forced retrieval through a wide range of engaging, tried and tested, classic Conti tasks (more than 20 per unit). These include student favourites such as slalom writing, faulty translation, spot the missing detail, sentence puzzles, etc.

Thanks,

Gianfranco & Ronan