Originally Published: Dublin Centre of TESOL Journal, 2009

ISSN: 1918-6495 (Print)

ISSN: 1918-6509 (Online)

Dublin Centre of TESOL Journal

Book Review: Totally True,1, 2, & 3

By Jann Huizenga
Published by: Oxford University Press, 2005

Zane Ritchie, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto

This three-book series is based upon a sequence of short re-written news

articles, which according to the publisher, are designed to "amaze, surprise,
entertain - and give students a great way to acquire, use and review new
vocabulary." From the naked tattooed guy who lives on a deserted island and
acts like a leopard, to a guard who uses interesting method to reduce crime in
his neighborhood, to the man who cooks meat on his car engine--some of the
stories certainly do have intriguing and potentially entertaining themes, but do
they stack up in a pedagogically, and just as importantly, do they generate
enough interest among students?

Each book in the series can also be used in conjunction with Oxford Bookworm
graded readers. Book 1 covers 400 head words and is aimed at beginners; Book
2 covers 700 headwords and is for high beginners; and Book 3 which covers
1,000 headwords is suited for lower-intermediate students. In addition, each
book focuses upon a particular grammatical structure, with Book 1 focusing on
simple present, present continuous and simple past; Book 2 on present perfect;
and Book 3 on present perfect continuous and past perfect.

The design of each unit is fairly similar, providing a certain familiarity to each
lesson. Each unit firstly sets a context for the main reading and asks students to
predict the story by looking at the accompanying series of pictures that
describe the story on the opposite page. This novel approach of using pictures
works well in the classroom as it encourages students coming up with all sorts
of interesting ideas about what the story will likely be about. In the Teaching
Suggestions section in the Foreword, Oxford also provides an alternative
approach: first have students could look at the pictures and then write down
two or three questions about the story, followed by the reading, which can then
be checked to see if they can find the answers to their original questions.
Additionally, to mix things up a little, I sometimes break students up into groups
according to the number of pictures and have them invent a possible part of the
story based upon their picture. Each group is then asked to read their version to
the class, in order. The results are often quite surprising!

Where things do seem to fall a little short is that as far as the new vocabulary is
concerned, no explanations or examples are provided. It therefore up to the
teacher to go through each of the new words with the students, although
dictionary meanings are provided in a glossary in the back of the book as
reference. Often, I felt that setting a specific context for new words would have
been preferable, although this a minor gripe as the overall system does seem to
work, with most students successfully managing to use most of the vocabulary
in their attempt to try and predict the story using the provided pictures.

Following a reading of the story, students are asked to rate it: "How much did
you like it? Mark an X" 1 is Not at all and 5 is a lot." By a simple examination of
the student’s book it is unclear what purpose this exercise serves, however the
Teaching Suggestions explains that students should rate the story and offer a
reason for their rating. However, in practice, I often find that students,
particularly at the first two levels of this series do not yet have the linguistic
skills to be able to successfully provide a detailed enough reason for why they
liked or disliked a particular story. Thus, more often than not, I felt that the
simple replies did not justify the time spent on the exercise. However, some
teachers may wish to incorporate it.

In the "Check Your Comprehension" exercises, student are asked to complete

matching the words, filling in the blanks, correcting mistakes in a summary, or
other similar exercises. One issue I had with this section was that often
questions were too simplistic, especially the "Check Your Vocabulary" part,
where students are asked to write in the missing new words (main vocabulary
from the lesson). What I do instead is to tell my students to close their books
and read the sentences out loud to them. They then compete with one another
to see who can guess the correct missing word. There are of many possible
variations on this and the teacher may want carry out the exercise
communicatively from student to student, for example.

Following the comprehension exercises, students have to re-tell the stories from
memory using the new vocabulary, this time guided by the pictures. At this
point, I am often amazed at how well even low-level students can successfully
re-tell the story pretty much faithful to the original, due of course to their
familiarity with the pictures and having read the story in advance. Here I felt
that the author had come up with an excellent combination of providing
students with the tools they need to communicate effectively, whilst keeping
the lessons fun and easy to partake in.
Each story is also accompanied by a dictation exercise, whereby the teacher
reads a very short summary of the story two or three times and students have
to write down as much as they can. I find this to be very useful, particularly
when there are a few minutes left at the end of the class. One could turn this
into a mini-game: who can get the most words right? What conjunctions and
prepositions did students struggle with, and so on.

The final part of the lesson is "Complete the Story." In a nutshell, there is a
second complementary story, and students are asked to complete it by filling in
the blanks from a list of provided words. They are then asked to talk about the
two stories, more often than not through comparisons. For example, Book
Three, Unit 3, Living without E-Mail, discusses the lives of the Amish and is
complemented by a Complete the Story Travelling Back in Time, about the
Bowler family who take part in a British TV programme called 1900 House, in
which they live for three months in conditions they would have one-hundred
years ago. Anyhow, upon filling in missing words from a list, students are then
asked; "How are the lives of the Amish and Bowler Family similar? How are they
different?" They are then prompted: "Would you like to live a simpler life? Why
or why not?" - Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. I sometimes
suspected that the author had run out of ideas for the complementing story. To
offer one example, the story “Friends on the Wall” (Book 3, chapter 10), a
bizarre story about the lengths lonely people will go to in order to feel needed,
is complemented with a rather mundane story about an old lady who lives with
her cat and no longer feels lonely that I felt was too simplistic and did not really
complement the main story. The question asked about these two stories for
discussion is: Which would you prefer -- to have a "wallpaper friend" or an
animal. Why? Many students struggled to come up with any meaningful
answers to this question. To be fair, other stories complement each other
brilliantly, as in Chapter 10, Book 1, where the story behind the Eiffel Tower
accompanies the main story about the world's tallest building. I will concede
that it will come down to personal preference, and what works in one class may
not work for another.

While Oxford promote the books primarily as a reading course, in practice the
series is more flexible than that and I have been able to successfully employ the
stories in conversation based classes too, due mainly to their short length of
just three to five paragraphs. In addition, the nature of the different stories and
the reactions they provoke, tends to make them ideal for conversation based
classes too. This also makes it very easy to expand on them, using
supplementary materials as a springboard for deeper discussion. You could have
students think about issues from different perspectives: One story is about a
Canadian boy who introduced wells to Africa and began his own foundation at
age eight, for example. Higher level students could be prompted discuss about
what they think about NGOs or whether they could think of other activities that
might help poor people, etc. There are also times where I have asked students
present more up-to date information on a particular story. For example, did they
know that there was also a Japanese guy who wanted to become a space
tourist? What was his story? How is it different to the original story? Again, there
are plenty of variations.

The Totally True series by Oxford provides a range of interesting, easy to grasp
stories in a simple appealing format, that does indeed "amaze, surprise and
entertain." In addition, for the teacher, the amount of accompanying exercises
provide more than enough possible lesson permutations, with something for all
styles. Finally, I must admit I have learned a lot too: did you know about the 87
year old Kenyan man who finally got to go to elementary school for example, or
the guy who almost exclusively eats Big Mac burgers and yet is wafer thin.
These are true stories. Totally recommended!