I got the second of the Popcorn ELT Readers, the British books for beginning English learners, today, and pretty much my review of the previous one applies to The Ice-Skating Competition. The big difference here is that instead of telling several tales, this book tells one long  (well, long for the format) one, a strip-based tale of Peppermint Patty preparing for an ice skating competition with Snoopy as her trainer and Marcie as her involuntary dressmaker and hair stylist. Presumably, this greater length goes along with it being a level 3 rather than a level 2 reader. And yes, I got the version with the CD again. One warning for those who might be interested in using these to train people in English: they use British punctuation, such as using ‘single quotes’ for quotation, rather than “double quotes”. Oh, those exotic foreign types! But other than that, it’s a perfectly fine little chapter book, with humor that survives better than some strip-to-text translations.

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