Irish Sentence Builders - A Lexicogrammar approach

Irish Sentence Builders is a workbook aimed at beginner to pre-intermediate students co-authored by two modern languages educators with over 40 years of extensive classroom experience between the two, both in the UK, Ireland and internationally.

This 'no-frills' book contains 19 units of work on very popular themes, jam-packed with graded vocabulary-building, reading, translation, retrieval practice and writing activities. Key vocabulary, lexical patterns and structures are recycled and interleaved throughout.

Each unit includes:

1) A sentence builder modelling the target constructions;

2) A set of vocabulary building activities;

3) A set of narrow reading texts exploited through a range of tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text;

4) A set of retrieval-practice translation tasks;

5) A set of writing tasks targeting essential micro-skills such as spelling, lexical retrieval, syntax, editing and communication of meaning.

Based on the Extensive Processing Instruction (E.P.I.) principle that learners learn best from comprehensible and highly patterned input flooded with the target linguistic features, the authors have carefully designed each and every text and activity to enable the student to process and produce each item many times over.

This occurs throughout each unit of work as well as in smaller grammar, vocabulary and question-skills micro-units located at regular intervals in the book, which aim at reinforcing the understanding and retention of the target grammar, vocabulary and question patterns.