Barratt, B. (1997) Brainwords: Book A. Melbourne: Longman. 110pp.

This recent book from Brian Barratt is one of a series of four, aimed at middle to upper primary students. There is also a separate Teacher's Book to accompany this mini-series but as yet I have only seen the one book that is reviewed here.

It is stated on the cover that the book comprises 'English enrichment and extension activities' and that it 'is not your usual sort of English series.' In fact, it contains a variety of topics grouped under six broad unit headings, Food, glorious food!, Beastly creatures, The mystery of certain things, The quest, What's on? and Heroes and myths, while Barratt's four 'brainwords' - explore, expand, enrich, experiment - are used to structure each subsection of these units.

The first of these, explore, seems intended to engage the students' curiosity (and is likely to do so), while also providing some information that may act as an advance organiser for what is to follow. The next section asks students to do something to expand their knowledge/skill, the enrich section "usually deals with an aspect of language ... to help ... enrich ... written and spoken expression" (p.vi), while the experiment section is meant to invite more creative responses.

Examples of experiment activities that live up to this ideal are:

a) Inventing new words, after considering Tolkein's and Lewis Carroll's invented words (p.66)

b) Compiling a program guide for a new TV station 'for people from many different cultures and times in history. Your viewers will include ancient Mesopotamians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Greeks and others. The "youngest" of your viewers was born in England in AD1650.' (p.85)

However, many of the experiment tasks in Book A are less inspiring and some would not seem out of place in your usual sort of English textbook, eg:

a) A list of ten words, preceded by the instructions: "How's your spelling? Which of these is correct? Write down the correct spelling. Your dictionary could be very useful here." (p.52)

b) Sorting out jumbled words and matching them with a list of definitions. (p.77)

c) Finding origins of words/terms, such as 'martial', 'the Midas touch', 'titanic'. (p.99)

d) Finding similes to do with animals and birds. (p.24)

A strength of this book may be its references to a well chosen set of literary examples - Storm Boy, Alice in Wonderland, Greek and Roman myths and legends and some non-fiction accounts (of mysteries, animals) - but on the other hand these are safe and somewhat predictable choices.

Furthermore, the activities will serve best the purposes of broadening students' vocabulary and extending their understanding of the structures of English, but do not seem to address the more challenging goal of developing critical thinking about literature. Perhaps it remains a moot point whether critical literacy is an attainable goal for all students in the upper primary years but for those talented in English it should form part of the intellectual opportunities on offer.

Nor is there an explicit aesthetic focus in these sets of activities; rather, literature is portrayed as a source of information and as a springboard for analysing English or for students' personal expression.

This said, Barratt's book contains many ideas that teachers will find useful, for wise teachers will refer to it selectively and add their own creative extensions or variations. And to be fair I should reserve judgement until I see the rest of the series.

Stan Bailey    

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