Brian Leaf’s Defining Twilight profitable but impractical concept for students

Min qiao

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For the devout lovers of Twilight, Brian Leaf’s Defining Twilight might seem like the ideal prep book for those painful standardized tests. Leaf’s book offers a simple, straightforward way to accumulate vocabulary in preparation for the verbal portion of standardized tests like the SAT. The workbook is divided into 40 “groups,” or chapters and each group features eight words that are pulled directly from Stephanie Meyer’s novel. To fully lock in the meanings of the words, there are several drills at the end of each chapter with exercises such as word analogies and sentence completion.  Finally, Leaf provides eight review quizzes on the vocabulary words are throughout the chapters.
Certainly, this approach to learning is probably more interesting then the typical, dry SAT prep books and flashcards. What is really different about this workbook is the tie-in with the popular novel and capitalizing on teen’s love of the story to get them to learn new words. Realistically, however, this approach is futile at best.

For one, basing an SAT prep book off of a popular novel might be an innovative and fun way to learn, but it is really quite impractical. For most readers, their interest in the books are peaked only when they are actually drawn in by the story, as if they were actually in midst of the action. Yet if the reader were to actually do the exercises as the workbooks says, he would have to stop every couple of pages, write down his guess for the meaning of each word, read through the actual definitions of the words and finally do the drills for those words. In the process, the flow of the reading would be disrupted; without the magical captivation of a book, the reader would lose interest pretty quickly. In the end, this workbook really only distracts the reader

from the story and because of that, the value of such a learning method is undermined.
Another detriment is the vocabulary used in the book. While Twilight might be all the rage right now, the word usage in the novel is hardly at the caliber of the words that appear on the SAT. Meyer’s novel is written to target the typical teenage girl looking for a good romance and an easy read. Therefore, the word usage throughout the book is not nearly as sophisticated as that which appears in the passages of the SAT. No matter how well the methods of learning offered in this book might work, the words featured in the workbook are simply too easy to truly prepare one for the SAT. Most kids taking the test should probably already know most of the words in this workbook and be studying much harder words if they are truly serious about doing well on the test.
Therefore, even though the idea behind Defining Twilight might sound fun, the workbook itself doesn’t realistically prepare one for the SAT’s.  Rather, it seems to little more than another scheme to cash on the latest fad and expand the Twilight franchise.