En tu medio: Intermediate Spanish
By Leah Fonder-Solano, Casilde A. Isabelli, and María Isabel Martínez Mira
En tu medio is a new program for intermediate Spanish and offers students a wealth of tools in a structured learning environment designed to empower them to master the language and be successful in the course. En tu medio uses a task-based, student-friendly approach to build from the introductory level toward a higher-level proficiency. Each of 10 sequential course sections offers meaningful activities designed to motivate students and positively reinforce successful communication. Rich media content – including voice recording assignments, topical videos, authentic short films, and other interactive activities – is integrated at the learning objective level providing students with a clear and engaging path through the material.
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Video and Voice Recording Assignments
These interactive voice recording assignments allow students to get the essential speaking practice they need along with just-in-time feedback through time-stamped comments. Use Wiley’s pre-created, text-specific video and voice recording activities or create your own Question & Answer high stakes video assignments that are ideal for assessing oral proficiency.
Cultural Videos
Students develop listening skills around documentary-style videos that explore cultural topics. Videos, along with high-interest readings and a wealth of authentic materials – photos, ads, cartoons, and other media from Spanish-speaking countries, tie into broad concepts and are used to provide authentic, higher-level input in Spanish, support vocabulary, grammar, or socio-cultural activities, and serve as a springboard to discussion and expansion activities.
Make learning clear and interactive
The Animated Grammar Tutorials explain grammatical topics in a student-friendly way and include simple practice exercises that reinforce what students just learned.
Make learning clear and interactive
The Animated Grammar Tutorials explain grammatical topics in a student-friendly way and include simple practice exercises that reinforce what students just learned.
Self-Scoring Practice Activities
Self-scoring practice exercises help students see what they’ve mastered and what they still need to master before completing higher-stakes online homework or assessment assignments.
Pre-created Assignments
Pre-created Assignments allow instructors to save time by choosing from an extensive bank of assignments they can to add to their course. These assignments often highlight questions with embedded audio or video and links to the text.
Adaptive Practice
Every student has a different starting point, and adaptive practice provides endless opportunities for practice to effectively prepare for class or quizzes and exams.
- Whole Texts vs. Disjointed Sentences: En tu medio presents both vocabulary and grammar with contextualizing paragraphs, blogs, ads, media, etc. which model and clarify usage. By teaching forms in relation to function, grammatical attention within broader contexts helps students intuit lexical meaning and grammatical patterns prior to their formal presentation, understand better what they read, grasp cultural and socio-linguistic subtexts, write more effectively, and apply grammar rules for meaningful communication.
- Input Processing: This proven model makes new concepts accessible to students by allowing them to notice and process content before they are asked to use or produce discourse with new information. For this reason, each new sequence of practice activities begins with a self-scoring true/false, agree/disagree, possible/impossible, multiple-choice, matching, ordering, or other recognition activity which requires students to understand meaning (and shows them that they do understand meaning) before moving on to practice using the target vocabulary or structure for communication.
- Task-Based Activities: En tu medio offers a broad array of theoretically grounded, class-tested, interactive and engaging activities that develop all language skills while completing meaningful tasks. Practice activities are thematically and culturally contextualized, reinforcing vocabulary and enhancing cultural knowledge as students build communicative skills. Whole-class activities are interwoven with individual, pair, and small group exercises, all of which are sequenced to support students as they learn and offer a varied pace and rhythm for class sessions. Each series of activities is carefully scaffolded to guide students from structured input (recognition), through structured output (producing short answers), toward more open-ended opportunities to create with the language and negotiate meaning through interaction with others.
- Thoughtful Grouping and Recycling of Grammatical Concepts: En tu medio groups related concepts together in each course section to provide an overview and emphasize usage. Each concept builds upon prior knowledge and students can access review topics as needed. Side boxes marked with a recycling icon remind students of related introductory concepts and in later sections Ya vimos boxes recall structures presented earlier in the program.
Features Include:
LEAH FONDER-SOLANO completed her graduate studies at the University of Arizona and then began a career as a teacher-researcher at The University of Southern Mississippi where she shared her passion for the language, culture, literature, film, and civilization of the Hispanic world with students at the undergraduate level and in the Master of Arts in the Teaching of Languages program. Her work on En tu medio has given her the opportunity to use her own experiences as a life-long language learner and teacher to inspire new learners as they move beyond introductory courses and explore the possibilities of meaningful communication and social connection in Spanish.
CASILDE A. ISABELLI is chair of the department of World Languages and associate professor of Spanish Linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in language, linguistics, and methodology. She was formerly the director of the Basic Spanish Language Program from 2001 until 2014. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish Applied Linguistics with a concentration in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001 and an M.A. in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics at the University of Iowa in 1994. Her research and publications focus on the effects of immersion experiences and formal instruction on SLA and psycholinguistically motivated theories behind SLA (processing instruction and language transfer).
MARÍA ISABEL MARTÍNEZ MIRA received her B.A. in English Philology from the University of Murcia in Murcia, Spain. She began teaching Spanish at the undergraduate level in 1996 at Millikin University in Decatur, IL, where she was a visiting instructor and taught Spanish language, linguistics, and culture courses. She earned her M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics in 2001 and her Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics with a SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education) certification at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Her teaching/research areas include English-Spanish bilingualism, sociolinguistics/Spanish variation, teaching of Spanish for heritage speakers, and languages in contact. She is currently an associate professor (Spanish) at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA. Her research on Spanish has been published in journals such as Spanish in Context, Sociolinguistic Studies, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.
1. Así somos
2. Aventuras para el tiempo libre
3. Los espectáculos y las artes
4. Tu vida profesional
5. ¡Conéct@te!
6. Tu salud física y mental
7. En tu medio
8. Tu mundo político y económico
9. La inmigración: fusión de culturas
10. Celebraciones y días festivos