BR 2-25: Oxford

The oldest university in England and one of the most famous cities in the world. But Oxford is not only a city of students, and its history was not always quiet and thoughtful. And what is modern Oxford really like? This book looks at the history of Oxford - but it also looks at the living city of today, its river, and some places of interest nearby...

Oxford is a book in the Factfiles subseries of Oxford Bookworms. As you may know, Factfiles is a nonfiction subseries. Many of the books are about places, and some about social problems such as the environment. Many of the books about places are about countries, but this one is about America's most populous state. Like many of the books, Oxford has ten chapers: Oxford; Early days; Troubled times; Out of the past; Oxford cars; The modern city; Oxford by day; Special days; oxford by night and Around Oxford.

The language in general is fairly simple, but the impressions is that it's noticeably more challenging than Stage 1 books. Most of the vocabulary is fairly simple, but there are many proper nouns. This is unavoidable in a book introducing a place, but may give an impression of difficulty to some students. Picking page 8 at random, the numbers of words in each sentence are as follows: 22, 10, 34, 10, 16, 21, 7, 31, 11, 21, 8. These figures give a mean of 17.3. One noticeable difference from Stage 1 books is the absence of very short sentences of fewer than 10 words, which may slow down reading speed a little.


The chapter that appealed to me the most was Chapter 1: Oxford. (277)