- This book will be of special value to middle school students and high school students growing up in families where English is not the first language. Like other titles in Barron’s Painless series, the approach to learning is informal and user-friendly. The authors take students step by step through all parts of speech nouns, pronouns, verbs, modifiers, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Next they offer advice for improving vocabulary, spelling, and American English pronunciation, emphasizing the importance of active listening, and learning vowel sounds and R sounds, and recognizing silent letters and homophones. The book’s final three chapters concentrate on written English, advancing from correct punctuation and sentence structure to writing essays and stories. The book’s gradual, step-by-step approach makes the mastery of English a truly painless process for students whose first language is other than English.