Around Here contains thirty topics familiar to all Chinese students. Its sole purpose is to provide a chance to activate vocabulary and grammar that they already know. Of course in the process of dealing with the topics, the teacher will be in a position to present new, often contentspecific vocabulary, but I recommend that students first be given a chance to communicate without it. The unit on ATMs, for example, lends itself to the presentation (or review) of such banking terms as deposit, withdraw and balance, and by the end of the discussion students should be familiar with these. At the outset, however, they are already capable of saying "put money in","take money out" and "how much money you have" and should, I feel, be encouraged to do so.