Jessica Williams - Inventions (Big Ideas Low Intermediate)

When you read an article or story, you have a conversation. The writer shares information, experiences, and ideas but you, the reader, have your own ideas. When you read, you compare your experience and knowledge with the writers ideas. Then you make decisions. Do you agree with the writer? Can you use the information to be healthier or more successful in your job, for example? Do you feel like the writer understands your life? Or do you learn about someone with a different point of view?

Because reading is a conversation, every reader experiences a text differently. When you read something interesting, you often want to talk about it. You want to share a similar experience, or you may want to argue. Maybe your friend understands the text in a different way. When you listen to your friend, you have a third set of ideas and experiences to compare to your own world view.

Big Ideas is designed to start interesting conversations between readers and writers, but also between readers and other readers. In this book, youll learn about the history of many different inventions. Some of them, like lightbulbs, eyeglasses, and windshield wipers, are probably familiar to you. You probably see them or use them every day. Others may be new to you. Some, like pencils, are very simple; others, like bar codes, are very complicated. And some, like chewing gum, are a bit silly, but a lot of fun, while others, like moveable type and GPS, have changed the way we live. All of these inventions have interesting stories.

While you learn about interesting inventions, Big Ideas is also helping you develop language skills. Because our focus is on providing a positive reading experience, more than 90 percent of the words in this book are among the most common 2000 words in the English language. These are called high-frequency words. High frequency words appear over and over again in speaking and writing.

You might think it will be easy to learn high frequency words, and it is true that many words are easy. Content words such as tree, house, eat, drink, and blue put a picture in your mind. They represent things you can see and name. They often have one meaning, and you can translate them easily.

However, many high frequency words change their meaning when they partner with other words in collocations. Stay is an example. When we say, I stayed home yesterday, then stay has a different meaning from Lets try to stay awake all night or Stay away from the cookies. Im saving them for the party. This flexibility shows that stay does not just have one meaning. It adapts to the words around it.

Fortunately, there is a method to learn the different meanings of collocations: read a lot. When you read, you see words in different combinations, and you learn their meanings. This can happen naturally, but it will happen faster if you pay attention to words in groups. When you notice and highlight or copy word combinations, you can learn the different meanings.

You can also learn the grammar that goes with a vocabulary word. For example, you might see educate as a verb in educate children, education as a noun in a college education, and educational as an adjective in an educational experience. You will also notice that some verbs are usually followed by a preposition, such as talk about or talk to, while others are followed by a noun, as in hear a bird. These grammatical details are hard to hear in spoken English, but they are easy to see in a written text. Check the Supplementary Materials section for a link to tools for developing language awareness in this way.

While vocabulary has a strong relationship with grammar, grammar has a strong relationship with sentences. In order to give you a positive reading experience, we have used easy-to-read sentences. We use grammar from low and intermediate levels, and we reduce synonyms and idioms. Our goal is to keep the big ideas about inventions, but present them in simple language.

For Big Ideas downloadable learning tools for students and teachers, go to

https://wayzgoosepress.com/jessica-williams/