Description

The Hollywood writer pops up from his nap on the studio couch, crumpled paper and coffee cans strewn about, and says ”I’m a writer. It’s hard. They want the script yesterday and I have to think this stuff up.” He’ll let you use his script — ”It’s horrible is what it is,” he says. If you fix the script up, he says you can have it.And then in some bizarre cinematic reversal, we cut to a reading exercise and vocabulary quiz, words and definitions flying across the screen, as Word Smart gets down to its real purpose.Word Smart is essentially a lengthy vocabulary-building drill designed to teach high schoolers and adults 1,600 words that might be useful on a college entrance exam and beyond: read the passage, click on the difficult words to get a definition. Take the quiz. Read the passage again, review word definitions and answer the questions again, until you get it right. It is intelligent and straightforward.But it is dressed up in a playful, sometimes funny and totally irrelevant, costume. You arrive at the studio gate to make a movie. You pick a type of movie to set the level of difficulty. Then it’s off to the writer, the producer, the actor, the technician and the critic, to get it produced in Hollyword. At each stop you have to take more vocabulary quizzes.Perhaps this formula will keep some students working at vocabulary exercises longer. I had been hoping to find more of a connection between vocabulary work and the jobs, and even more innovative vocabulary-building techniques.