A question about the New Headway course

[Loesie]

This is my first real post and I don't know if I placed it in the right place.

I want to use the New Headway course for self study, but on amazon.co.uk people review it as a British English course with to much American English. Does someone know if this is true? Do you think that the Face 2 Face course from Cambridge is a better replacement?

Thank you.

[Tdol]

I'm not honestly sure what they mean by that. It's a good idea to have some exposure to both AE and BrE, so it seems a rather weak criticism to me.

[Loesie]

This is one of the reviews from Amazon:

"Very unfortunately, "New Headway Elementary", which used to be an excellent British English textbook, has now been converted into a horrible mish-mash of British and American, with a strong American bias. Recommended for Americans maybe, but definitely not recommended for British English."

Maybe it's good to have some understanding of both versions of English. But I think that you'll have to focus on one variant, in my case British English. When I'm going to learn the two together, I think I'm messing things up and then maybe people don't understand me. But then, trusting on two reviews from Amazon.co.uk is not enough, so I would like to hear some more comments.

[Tdol]

Headway has British and American English editions anyway.

[BobK]

This is one of the reviews from Amazon:

"Very unfortunately, "New Headway Elementary", which used to be an excellent British English textbook, has now been converted into a horrible mish-mash of British and American, with a strong American bias. Recommended for Americans maybe, but definitely not recommended for British English."

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Here we go again - self-styled Guardians of Proper English bewailing the influence of American English. BE would be a lot poorer without the influence of AmE.

b

[Tdol]

I wonder exactly what they mean? Headway did teach 'have' for both possession and action a long time ago- is it things like that?

[BobK]

I was too hasty (I think). Maybe they were talking about this:

http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/tea...way/?cc=global

b

[Tdol]

It seems odd to complain that the American Headway is too American if that was what they meant.

PS I couldn't get the link open, so I assume it's the American English version.