Lisa J. Powers

The People Who Let Go of Their Rocks: Story of a War Dance, Clauses, Phrases, Verbals, and Verbs Lisa J. Powers

In Part One, from across a wide river, a small boy spies on the people of a forbidden village. He learns strange movements from them, and he cannot know how much his actions will affect his mother, father, and all the people of his own village. The story's language is simple, economical, emphatic, lyrical--unobtrusively mnemonic, optimized for non-native speaker comprehension and retention. The story's vocabulary does not stray much beyond the 3,000 most commonly used words in English. In Part Two, students may complete exercises about independent clause verbs, dependent clause verbs, verbals, phrasal verbs, and other verb collocations. The exercises are cumulative in skill building and varied in format, paced like physical interval training. The exercises focus deeply on verb and verbal behavior in English sentences. Overall, Lisa J. Powers's system aligns with Benjamin Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. Gratifyingly convenient, answer keys appear immediately after their exercises. Lisa knows that language drill outside of context is not meaningful, and content without drill does not improve retention. Lisa gives students ample exposure and practice by way of suspenseful context with English verbs, verbals, phrasal verbs, and other verb collocations because she knows students need this kind of practice the most. Lisa J. Powers was first inspired to tell her own allegorical stories when she was around four years old, when her father used to read Taro Yashima's Crow Boy to her. Now she writes for Limited English Proficient populations.