Cambridge English · Learner e-book
Ten readings of what English means and does not say
C2 Proficiency · CEFR C2 · 10 units · 100 minutes of audio · Units 1–2 live, 3–10 in production
Ten units, one season of close readings — each stop one way English means more than it says, and one piece of the C2 Proficiency exam. Work in order: the readings compound.
Unit 1 · Between the Lines
Irony — the audible gap between what is said and what is meant, from a flooded stage to a misfired email.
Sixty seconds, from memory, before anything new.
English is arguably the world's most irony-saturated major language, and Britain its most committed practitioner: a culture that says “lovely weather” into horizontal rain, files disasters under “a bit of a problem”, and prefers its praise damned faint. The device is not decoration — it is a social instrument for testing alliance (are you in on the joke?), and it has never adopted an irony mark in five centuries of printing because a marked irony is a dead one. This unit takes the instrument apart: its mechanism, its species, its danger scale — and the one honest question of when not to use it at all.
A theatre roof fails mid-performance. Water pours onto the stage in front of six hundred people — and four deadpan words save the show. Commit to a guess out loud: what could they be?
[MUSIC: theme, 4 seconds, under]
VIVIAN (velvet) Between the Lines. I'm Vivian, he's Marcus, and this week: irony — the English art of meaning the opposite, out loud, on purpose.
MARCUS (dry) Strictly, not always the opposite. But do begin with the flood; definitions keep.
VIVIAN The flood. Nineteen seventy-eight, the Theatre Royal, opening night of a play I shall not name, because its author is still alive and still angry. Act Two, the heavens opened — not in the script, you understand, but through the roof. Actual water, on an actual stage, in front of six hundred paying witnesses.
MARCUS I have seen the roof in question. A biblical failure.
VIVIAN And the rain came down my leading man's noble profile, and his wig began — there is no kinder word — to migrate. Six hundred people watching a career drown. And he stepped to the front of the stage, looked up into the deluge, and said, deadpan, to the gallery: “A fine day for it.”
MARCUS (a rare chuckle) Four words.
VIVIAN Four words, and the house came down harder than the rain. They laughed for a full minute. And here is the thing, Marcus — the laugh saved the show. We finished the act soaked to the bone, and they stood at the end. Had he said, “I'm terribly sorry, we have a leak,” they'd have filed out politely and asked for refunds.
MARCUS So. What did the four words actually do? Because on their surface they are a weather report, and a false one.
VIVIAN They were an invitation. He said the wrong thing on purpose, where everyone could see it was wrong, and in doing so he asked six hundred strangers a question: are you in on the joke? And they were. One roof, six hundred accomplices.
MARCUS There is the definition, and it is better than the one in my dictionary. Irony is not lying, although it shares all of lying's machinery. The liar hopes the gap between word and meaning will never be found. The ironist builds the gap in public and hands you a lantern.
VIVIAN Which is why irony taken at face value is such a particular catastrophe. The listener falls into the gap the speaker dug for both of you to stand beside, admiring.
MARCUS And why it cannot be punctuated into safety. People ask me — lexicographers get asked these things at parties, which tells you about the parties — why English has no irony mark. Some printer proposed one, a reversed question mark, centuries ago. It never took.
VIVIAN Because a marked irony is a dead irony.
MARCUS Precisely. The entire wage of the device is paid in risk. Flag it, and you have a joke with its receipt stapled to it — “that was irony, please laugh now” — which is no longer wit but paperwork.
VIVIAN (delighted) Paperwork. I shall steal that.
MARCUS You are recorded stealing it, which is the safest theft available. And since we have a woman of the theatre at the table — there is a third species you know professionally. Dramatic irony.
VIVIAN Ah, the cruellest and the kindest. The audience knows the letter is forged; the hero does not. Nobody on stage says anything untrue — the gap is not between word and meaning but between what the room knows and what the character knows. The audience becomes six hundred people holding one enormous secret, and the tension of holding it is the play.
MARCUS Which is worth the learner's attention for one practical reason: English conversation borrows the trick constantly. Two colleagues exchange a glance over a third's confident error, and for a moment they are an audience, and he is on stage. Nothing said, everything meant.
VIVIAN We do it with the eyebrows. An entire national theatre of the eyebrows.
MARCUS Now — the taxonomy, briefly, because learners deserve the map. Irony says the unmeant thing and trusts you to invert it. Sarcasm is irony with a target — irony at someone's expense, the barbed cousin. And understatement, which our colleagues one level down spent a whole unit on, is irony's mildest child: the words too small for the event, worn deliberately.
VIVIAN “A fine day for it” being all three at once, if you like: ironic in structure, understated in scale, and sarcastic at the expense of — well, of the roof.
MARCUS Of the roof, and gently of the profession itself. Which points at the true English signature: the preferred target is oneself. Self-deprecation is irony aimed inward — the pratfall performed before anyone else can trip you.
VIVIAN Darling, my entire career. I have introduced myself for fifty years as “briefly famous in the seventies”, and the room relaxes every single time. I hand them the joke about me before they can make a worse one. It is armour worn as modesty.
MARCUS Armour worn as modesty. And you accuse ME of coining.
VIVIAN We are recorded, so the theft is safe. (beat, warmer) After the break: the close reading. Marcus has brought specimens, I have brought a poker face, and one of the specimens misfires badly — which is where the real lesson lives.
MARCUS (deadpan) I can hardly wait.
VIVIAN (laughing) You see? You see what he did?
[MUSIC: theme, 5 seconds, up and out]
---A critical essay · 460 words
The lantern in the gap. Every lie and every irony share a single piece of engineering: a gap between what the words say and what the speaker means. The entire moral difference — and it is the difference between fraud and art — lies in the lighting. The liar digs the gap in darkness and prays it is never found. The ironist digs it in full view, hangs a lantern over it, and waits, with some confidence, for you to climb down and join them.
The waiting is the point. An irony that explains itself has not merely failed; it has become something else — a joke with its receipt stapled to it, wit downgraded to paperwork. This is why English, in five centuries of restless printing, has never adopted an irony mark, though printers have proposed one at intervals since the seventeenth century. The proposals were not rejected because the mark was ugly. They were rejected, one suspects, because the mark would have worked. Flagged irony is safe irony, and safe irony is no irony at all: the entire wage of the device is paid in risk.
Risk to whom, though? The unlucky reader who takes the words at face value falls into the gap — a small humiliation, quickly forgiven. The graver risk belongs to the speaker, and it is measured on a scale. Irony at circumstance — the weather, the delay, the leaking roof — has no victim, and so costs nothing. Irony at oneself costs a little pride and buys a room's goodwill. Banter spends the credit of a friendship, which is what the credit is for. But irony aimed downward, at a listener who never volunteered — that is not a use of the device. It is the device's abuse, sarcasm in office wear, and no lantern excuses it.
Which suggests the truest description of irony we have: it is a trust exercise conducted in public. The speaker leans backwards on the plain meaning of their own words and trusts the listener to catch them. When it works, the two of them have built something no sincere sentence can build — a small conspiracy of understanding. When it fails, someone is lying on the floor. The art is in knowing, before you lean, who is standing behind you.
The mechanism: say the wrong thing on purpose, where everyone can see it is wrong, and ask: are you in on the joke? The species: plain irony trusts you to invert it; sarcasm adds a target; understatement shrinks the words below the event; self-deprecation aims inward — armour worn as modesty; dramatic irony moves the gap from the words to the knowledge. Worked example: “A fine day for it” — ironic in structure, understated in scale, gently sarcastic at the expense of the roof; one utterance, three species, six hundred accomplices.
Identify each specimen precisely.
Each specimen has gone wrong. Diagnose the missing safety.
Write one line of rung-one or rung-two irony for each situation.
[MUSIC: theme, 4 seconds, under]
MARCUS The Close Reading. Specimens on the table. The first is the commonest irony in Britain, performed daily at every bus stop in the land. It is raining sideways, and a stranger says: “Lovely weather.”
VIVIAN The national password.
MARCUS It is exactly that, and observe the mechanism, because it is doing something delicate. The stranger is not commenting on the weather. The weather is merely the shared, undeniable fact — the stage. What the words transmit is: I propose two minutes of alliance against circumstance. Reply in kind — “glorious, isn't it” — and you have joined. Reply with a forecast, and you have declined.
VIVIAN And note that no one is mocked. There is no victim at the bus stop. The rain takes the blow.
MARCUS Which makes it the safest irony in the language, and therefore the learner's correct first purchase. Specimen two, Vivian — the workplace, where the stakes rise.
VIVIAN A colleague arrives at nine forty, breathless, coffee-stained, and the person by the kettle says, perfectly flat: “Good afternoon.”
MARCUS Two words. Parse them.
VIVIAN On the surface, a greeting and a factual error. Beneath: your lateness has been observed, catalogued, and — this is the important clause — forgiven. It is a fine, because it is a rebuke you may laugh at, and laughter is how you pay it. The deadpan is what makes it merciful; delivered with a glare it would be discipline. Delivered flat, it is banter, and banter is the licence colleagues issue one another to be rude affectionately.
MARCUS Affectionate mockery as social currency — you may only tease those with whom you are safe, so the tease itself is the certificate of safety. Foreign colleagues are owed this explanation on their first morning, and almost never given it.
VIVIAN Now the misfire, because we promised one, and because everything before it has been too comfortable.
MARCUS Specimen three. An email, real, anonymised. A manager, to a team that has missed a deadline, writes: “Wonderful work, everyone. Truly inspired.”
VIVIAN (a hiss through teeth) No. No, no.
MARCUS Diagnose it.
VIVIAN Every safety is missing. Irony wants a shared stage — the rain, the clock — some fact both parties can see, so the words can be measured against it and found deliberately wrong. In an email there is no voice, no deadpan to hear, no eyebrow. And the target is not a roof or a rain cloud; it is the readers themselves. So half the team reads it at face value and replies “thank you”, deepening the wound they cannot see; the other half hears the barb perfectly and hears also that the manager chose armour-piercing rounds and called it wit.
MARCUS The device, mishandled, produces both a misunderstanding AND an injury — a remarkable economy of damage. The rule that falls out of the wreckage: irony travels badly in writing and worse downward. Said upward or sideways, at shared misfortune, it binds. Said downward, at the listener, it is sarcasm in office wear.
VIVIAN And the learner's corollary, which I want said plainly because it is kind: you are never obliged to produce irony. Detection is the C2 skill. Production is optional, forever. The penalty for missing a joke is a moment's confusion; the penalty for a misfired one can be a working relationship.
MARCUS Begin at the bus stop, where the rain absorbs all errors. Graduate, if you wish, to self-deprecation, where the only victim has consented. Leave the barbed registers to people who have known each other twenty years.
VIVIAN Or who are married, which is the same thing with worse catering. (beat) The scale, then, before the Talking Point — from safest to most dangerous.
MARCUS Rung one: irony at circumstance — weather, delays, the roof. No victim. Rung two: self-deprecation — the victim is you, and you volunteered. Rung three: banter — a victim who is also an accomplice, protected by licence. Rung four: sarcasm proper — a victim who is neither. That rung is not a language skill. It is a choice about what kind of colleague to be.
VIVIAN Beautifully put, and note, listeners, that he said it deadpan, so you cannot tell how much he means it. That ambiguity is not a bug in the man. It is the device, worn as a personality.
MARCUS (perfectly flat) I have no idea what you mean.
VIVIAN (laughing) The Talking Point, quickly, before he does it again.
[TALKING POINT]
VIVIAN Does your language do this? When someone says the opposite of what they mean, how do listeners know? Describe the signals — the voice, the face, the words that give it away.
[PAUSE: 5 seconds]
MARCUS Now the detection drill. Think of the last time you took something at face value that was not meant that way — or produced irony that misfired. What signal was missing?
[PAUSE: 5 seconds]
VIVIAN That is the Close Reading, and it has been, genuinely, a fine day for it.
[MUSIC: theme, 5 seconds, up and out]
| Item | In the unit |
|---|---|
| irony / ironist | Meaning the opposite, out loud, on purpose. |
| deadpan | The poker face of delivery. |
| tongue-in-cheek | The joke folded inside. |
| wry | A small dry sideways smile of a remark. |
| feigned | The eyebrows doing theatre. |
| knowing | Nothing said, everything meant. |
| conspiratorial | The glance that makes two people an audience. |
| at someone's expense | Sarcasm's address. |
| dry wit | Chalk dust, twice as precise. |
| self-deprecation | The pratfall performed first. |
| take at face value | Fall into the gap. |
| in on the joke | The invitation every irony extends. |
| poker face | What Vivian brought to the reading. |
| barbed | The hook in the smile. |
| affectionate mockery | Teasing as the certificate of safety. |
| banter | The licence to be rude affectionately. |
| mock-serious | Grave in tone, playful in intent. |
| land (of a joke) | Harder than the rain. |
| misfire | No shared stage, no lantern. |
| accomplice | One roof, six hundred of them. |
Where this unit pays off in C2 Proficiency: Listening Part 3 — the unstated position behind an even voice is irony detection as an exam task. Reading Part 5 — implication, tone, attitude and stylistic effect. Writing Part 1 — hearing what each input text does, not only what it says. Speaking Part 3 — ten minutes in which wit must bind, never wound.
Six retrieval questions — no looking back.
Unit 2 · Between the Lines
What English says by saying nothing — from four seconds at the Old Vic to the Sunday sofa.
Unit 1 rides along. Sixty seconds, from memory.
English conversation abhors dead air — the whole small-talk machine of the B-level courses exists to prevent it — which is precisely what makes the deliberate pause so powerful here. A culture that rushes to fill silence will read any unfilled second as loaded. So the pause becomes an instrument: the actor's four seconds that reverse a line; the negotiator's ten that move a price; the nation's two minutes in November, when the buses pull over; and the hour on the sofa that is the highest compliment the culture pays. This unit is about reading those silences — and about earning the right to hold one.
“Did you ever love me at all?” — four full seconds — then, quietly: “Of course.” Commit to a reading out loud: what did the wait do to the words?
[MUSIC: theme, 4 seconds, under]
VIVIAN (velvet) Between the Lines, week two. Last time, the gap between the said and the meant. This week, Marcus, we remove the words entirely.
MARCUS (dry) The pause. My dictionary defines it as an absence. My colleague here has spent fifty years proving the dictionary wrong.
VIVIAN Because the pause is not an absence, darling — it is the most heavily loaded syllable in English, and it happens to be silent. Shall I tell them about the Old Vic?
MARCUS I have been waiting all week for you to tell them about the Old Vic.
VIVIAN Nineteen eighty-one. A two-hander, a marriage collapsing on stage, and the finest actor I ever shared a stage with — I shall call him Gerald, because that was not his name. In the second act, my character asks his: “Did you ever love me at all?”
MARCUS And the script says?
VIVIAN The script says: GERALD: “Of course.” Two words, and on the page they are a reassurance. In rehearsal, Gerald said them straight away, and the scene lay there like a dropped coat. Competent. Dead. And then one evening — the third preview — he waited.
MARCUS How long?
VIVIAN Four seconds. Count them sometime; on a stage, four seconds is a geological era. The house went absolutely still — that particular hush an audience makes when it has stopped being an audience. And then, very quietly: “Of course.”
MARCUS The same two words.
VIVIAN The identical two words — and the pause reversed them. The wait said: he is searching. And if he has to search, the answer is no. The “of course” became a kindness, a lie agreed between two people at the end of something, and I promise you the entire theatre heard the no inside the yes. A woman in the second row put her hand over her mouth.
MARCUS There is the mechanism, stated better than any reference book manages it. The pause is a container. It holds whatever the listener is most afraid of — or most hoping for. The words that follow merely confirm the delivery.
VIVIAN Gerald called it letting it hang. “Let it hang, Viv,” he'd say. “The audience will fill it with something better than anything the writer can afford.”
MARCUS Which is why the same machinery is so dangerous at a kitchen table. Ask “do you like it?” about anything — the haircut, the novel, the risotto — and time the reply. The content of the answer arrives before a single word does. A beat of hesitation, then “no, it's lovely” — and the “no” you heard was not a slip of the tongue. It was the true answer, escaping under the fence.
VIVIAN We are all Gerald at the kitchen table. Most of us are simply not in control of the instrument.
MARCUS And control is the entire craft. The lexicon here is precise, if anyone cares to use it. A BEAT is rhythm — the comedian's tool, one breath long. A LULL is weather — the conversation resting, no cargo aboard. A PREGNANT PAUSE is expectation: something is coming, and everyone can hear its footsteps. And a STONY silence is a verdict delivered in the listener's own materials.
VIVIAN You have been hoarding that little taxonomy for years.
MARCUS Decades. Lexicographers do not waste a good taxonomy on a quiet Tuesday.
VIVIAN Then let me add the actor's footnote. On stage there is a rule: you may hold a pause exactly as long as you are doing something in it. The moment you are merely waiting, the audience feels the difference — the pause dies in your hands like a bird. Silence is not the absence of performance. It is the most exposed performance there is.
MARCUS Which transfers, note, to every negotiation and every difficult conversation this audience will ever have. An occupied silence — thinking, weighing your words, visibly deciding — commands the room. An empty one begs the room to rescue you.
VIVIAN And the room always knows the difference. Audiences are never wrong about silence. They are frequently wrong about words, but never about silence.
MARCUS (beat) After the break: the Close Reading. The phone call, the job offer, the two minutes in November — and the silence that is the highest compliment this culture pays.
VIVIAN (over music) He means the sofa. Wait for the sofa.
[MUSIC: theme, 5 seconds, up and out]
---A director's notebook · 450 words
Notes on nothing. Early in rehearsals I ban two things: paraphrase, and fear of silence. The first ban surprises nobody. The second surprises everyone, because most young actors believe silence is what happens when acting stops. It takes weeks to teach them the opposite: that a held pause is the most exposed acting there is, and that an audience — never wrong about silence, though frequently wrong about words — can tell an occupied pause from an empty one at forty rows' distance.
An occupied pause has cargo. The character is searching, or deciding, or refusing to decide — and the audience, receiving no words, leans in and does the work themselves. That is the trade at the heart of the craft: every second you decline to speak, the house writes for you, and the house is a better writer than any of us. The empty pause offers no cargo, only duration, and the house feels the difference instantly — a held breath curdling into a held-up queue.
The same physics, I have come to believe, governs every conversation off the stage. The beat before an answer is read, always and involuntarily, as content: hesitation before praise revalues the praise; hesitation before “fine” repeals it. A pause held while visibly weighing your words commands any room, from rehearsal to boardroom. A pause held merely because you dare not speak begs the room to rescue you — and rooms, like audiences, always know which they are watching.
So the note I give most often is the note I was given forty years ago: do something in it. Decide something. Refuse something. Remember something — the audience will see it cross your face at forty rows, I promise you. And when the silence has done its work, let the line fall into the space the silence built for it. A word after a true pause weighs three times what it weighs in traffic. That arithmetic is the whole reason theatres exist — and the reason, I suspect, that the best conversations are the ones with the courage to stop talking.
The taxonomy: a beat is rhythm; a lull is weather; a pregnant pause is expectation; a stony silence is a verdict; the companionable silence is the destination. The laws: the pause is a container for what the listener most fears or hopes; the content of an answer arrives before the words do; and you may hold a pause exactly as long as you are doing something in it. Worked example: (a measurable pause) “Fine.” — the pause is the confession; the word is the cover-up arriving late.
Identify the species in each scene.
Read each delay. What arrived before the words?
Script the pause: describe what you would DO in it.
[MUSIC: theme, 4 seconds, under]
MARCUS The Close Reading. Specimens on the table, and the first is domestic. A telephone call. One party asks: “Is everything all right?” The reply, after a measurable pause: “Fine.”
VIVIAN (a hiss) Every married listener has just flinched.
MARCUS Parse it. “Fine”, delivered instantly, is fine. “Fine”, delivered after the pause, has been through a selection process — the speaker audibly considered other answers, rejected them as unsayable, and reached for the smallest word in the building. The pause is the confession; the word is the cover-up arriving late.
VIVIAN And note the trap for the well-meaning: you cannot fix it by asking again. “Are you SURE?” merely forces the machine to produce a second “fine”, colder than the first. The correct reading of a loaded “fine” is an action, not a question. Put the kettle on.
MARCUS Specimen two — the negotiation. Folk wisdom in every sales handbook says: after you name your price, the first person to speak loses.
VIVIAN Is it true?
MARCUS As folklore, it is overstated; as observation, it holds. Silence after an offer applies pressure precisely because this culture experiences dead air as an emergency. Most people will bid against themselves just to end it. The trained negotiator has simply learned what Gerald knew: an occupied silence is work being done. Let the offer hang, and it grows heavier on the other side of the table.
VIVIAN The defence, for our listeners, is charmingly simple: silence is only leverage if it frightens you. Make a friend of it. Count the seconds like an actor and let the other side hear you not being afraid.
MARCUS A caution before the next one, because the instrument has an abusive setting. The SILENT TREATMENT — silence deployed as punishment, for days — is not an art; it is the stony silence weaponised, a verdict with no appeal and no end date. Learners should know the phrase and refuse the practice. Biting your tongue is a discipline you impose on yourself for one sentence. The silent treatment is a sentence you impose on somebody else.
VIVIAN Beautifully severed. And its opposite number, the loveliest silence in the lexicon: the pause in which the penny drops. Watch a listener mid-conversation — the eyes still, the breath held — as an idea completes itself. Interrupt that silence and you have robbed them of the arrival. Every teacher learns it eventually: the pause after a good question is where the learning actually happens. Wait.
MARCUS Specimen three, and a change of register — the civic pause. In November, this country stops for two minutes of silence for its war dead. Eleven o'clock, the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Buses pull over. Supermarkets go quiet over the tannoy.
VIVIAN I have stood in a rehearsal room when it fell. Forty actors — professionally incapable of silence — utterly still.
MARCUS And observe what the ritual understands: that silence is the only register with no vocabulary to get wrong. A speech divides; a hymn excludes somebody. Two shared minutes of nothing is the one text everyone can recite perfectly. The pause, scaled up to a nation, becomes the most articulate thing the nation does.
VIVIAN Now the sofa, Marcus. I promised them the sofa.
MARCUS The final specimen, and the warmest. Two people on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon, books open, tea cooling, saying nothing for an hour — and nothing is wrong. The companionable silence.
VIVIAN The highest compliment this culture pays. With acquaintances, remember, silence is an emergency — the machine from last unit exists precisely to prevent it. So the person you can be silent WITH has been issued the ultimate certificate: your presence requires no performance.
MARCUS The taxonomy closes neatly, then. Silence with strangers is a gap to be filled. Silence with an adversary is a lever. Silence with a nation is a liturgy. And silence with the right person, on the right sofa, is the destination — the point at which the entire apparatus of English conversation can finally be switched off.
VIVIAN (softly) Fifty years on stage, and the finest review I ever received was a man who fell asleep beside me at the interval and held my programme while he did it.
MARCUS (a long beat — deliberately) …
VIVIAN (laughing) You held it! You held the pause, you wicked man — and every listener just filled it, exactly as Gerald said they would.
MARCUS (perfectly flat) I was doing something in it. The Talking Point, please.
[TALKING POINT]
VIVIAN How does your culture hear silence — as rudeness, as respect, as comfort, as threat? Where does a pause stop being polite and start meaning something?
[PAUSE: 5 seconds]
MARCUS Now the instrument drill. Say “of course” three ways: instantly; after one beat; after four full seconds. Listen to the meaning change while the words stand still.
[PAUSE: 5 seconds]
VIVIAN That — (a beat, held) — is the Close Reading.
[MUSIC: theme, 5 seconds, up and out]
| Item | In the unit |
|---|---|
| pause | The most heavily loaded syllable in English. |
| beat | One breath — the comedian's tool. |
| lull | The conversation resting. |
| hush | A house that has stopped being an audience. |
| pregnant pause | Everyone can hear its footsteps. |
| stony silence | A verdict in the listener's materials. |
| companionable silence | The highest compliment paid here. |
| let it hang | The house will fill it. |
| bite your tongue | A discipline, self-imposed, one sentence long. |
| hold your peace | To choose not to object. |
| clam up | Suddenly, defensively silent. |
| the silent treatment | The stony silence weaponised. |
| unspoken | Never stated, fully understood. |
| tacit | Unsigned and binding. |
| weigh your words | The occupied silence at work. |
| measured | Each word priced before spending. |
| the penny drops | Do not interrupt the arrival. |
| lost for words | The container overflows. |
| a lull in the conversation | Nothing wrong. |
| dead air | The local emergency. |
Where this unit pays off in C2 Proficiency: Listening Part 3 — hesitation is data; the unstated position lives in the delay. Speaking Part 3 — a two-minute turn where an occupied pause outranks any filler, then six minutes where timing is register. Reading Part 5 — what the writer declines to say. Writing Part 1 — weighing two voices, including their silences.
Units 1 and 2 together — the interleaving is deliberate.
Unit 3 · in production COMING SOON
Politeness and its inversions.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 4 · in production COMING SOON
Allusion, quotation, and the sentence with two authors.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 5 · in production COMING SOON
Puns, wordplay, and the economics of the terrible joke.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 6 · in production COMING SOON
The figures hiding in ordinary speech.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 7 · in production COMING SOON
Taboo, softening, and the words for what we won't say.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 8 · in production COMING SOON
The sound of persuasion.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 9 · in production COMING SOON
Accent, dialect and identity.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.
Unit 10 · in production COMING SOON
Sincerity as the final device.
This unit follows the same shape as Units 1 and 2: outcomes, recall starter, the culture behind the unit, two audio segments with word-for-word scripts, a grammar-loaded reading passage, the Grammar Clinic with three practice sets and answer keys, the vocabulary bank, the exam link, and the review. It unlocks when its scripts are authored.