Aula en acción 2 - Lesson at a glance

en acción

Jaime Corpas

Eva García

Agustín Garmendia

Carmen Soriano

Claudia Fernández

University of Illinois–Chicago with contributions by Muriel Gallego Ohio University

en acción

While many of us aim to implement proficiency-oriented Spanish classes, we know that achieving this in practice is no easy feat. This undertaking involves a variety of factors that must align in order to work effectively. One of the most important factors is the material we work with and the extent to which it facilitates our mission of teaching towards communicative goals.

Like many of you, I wanted to put into practice a proficiency-oriented Spanish program whose objective was for students to use the language for real, communicative purposes. I knew we needed well-designed, principle-based materials that helped our students carry out authentic, real-world tasks and, in the process, enabled their acquisition of Spanish and developed both their communicative ability and intercultural competence.

You can imagine then how thrilled I was at the opportunity to be a part of AULA EN ACCIÓN, a task-based program where the linguistic resources and informational content are guided by the task at the end of each chapter. These final tasks invite students to personalize and make them their own, to be creative, and to share their interests—all while using Spanish authentically with a truly communicative purpose. Following a backward design, the chapter activities are developed in keeping with this final goal while helping students use Spanish to learn about themselves, each other, their communities, and the Spanish-speaking world both in the USA and abroad.

AULA EN ACCIÓN

accompanies us each step of the way as we implement a proficiency-oriented curriculum for our students. I very much hope that you reach your proficiency-oriented goals and that you find AULA EN ACCIÓN a helpful tool to achieve them.

Claudia Fernández

AULA EN ACCIÓN is a modern, effective, and comprehensive Spanish program designed to bring the most advanced communicative approaches to the Spanish-language classroom.

The main objectives of AULA EN ACCIÓN are:

• Putting students at the center of their own learning process

• Prioritizing meaningful use of language

• Offering an inclusive, contemporary vision of Spanish-speaking countries, free of stereotypes

• Facilitating instruction

Primer contacto

In the opening double-page spread of each lesson, the work that learners will complete at the end of the lesson is explained in detail as well as the communicative, grammatical, and lexical resources that will be incorporated. We dive right into the theme of the lesson through an activity that stimulates any background knowledge we may have and gives us our first contact with the lexicon that we’re going to need.

Realistic tasks, in keeping with the Can-Do statements, allow students to begin using authentic communication processes.

The proposed activities allow students to grasp the lexical and grammatical elements in a useful, meaningful way

Comprendemos

On these two double-page spreads , a large part of the active vocabulary from the lesson is presented in a visually appealing format in context. The diversity and quality of texts included in this section allows the students a flexible approach -active

reading and listening comprehension, communication- all of it helping them to immerse in the unit's theme.

take on an active role; that is, we learn

the vocabulary by completing short tasks of comprehension, classification, personalization, etc. which lead us to interact with the lexicon in a meaningful way. It is not a matter of simply memorizing a list of words and filling in the blanks, but rather guiding us to understand the meaning of these new lexical items and using them in a simple, communicative way.

Active vocabulary is noted in blue: these are words of special relevance in the unit.

esta

DIRECTORA, MUCHO MÁS QUE SER MUJER

LA NUEVA “BEAUTY”

DERRIBAR ESTEREOTIPO SIENDO PARTE

Praznik

realidad que quieren mostrar no es una realidad y que, en vez de incluir, lo que hacen es excluir. Muchas veces caricaturizan las realidades y no toman en serio las familias cuando no son heterosexuales”, opina. En este sentido, dice, “el rol de la mujer como directora viene a traer otra mirada, en la que posiblemente las generaciones anteriores no estábamos tan acostumbrados a ver". (…) Lo más importante para ella es no perder de vista a quién le estás hablando y cómo vas a transmitir ese mensaje. (…) "Muchas veces esos nexos pasan por lugares comunes, la juventud, la inexperiencia, y en todo eso uno puede identificarse igual. No importa si la persona es mujer, hombre, no binarie, o cuál sea su orientación sexual, creo que el punto pasa por encontrar esos espacios que puedan integrar”. (…) Muchas veces un casting en sí mismo cuenta una historia, se nota un trabajo previo para dar con mujeres diversas y reales. Según cuentan Bel y Ju, “buscamos la autenticidad en nuestro trabajo y esto también se refleja en la elección del casting, estamos profundamente involucrados en la investigación, junto con nuestro equipo, siempre buscando mujeres reales que tengan una historia que contar, que representen la diversidad”. (…)

En sintonía con derribar los estereotipos reinantes, hay temas y conceptos que evolucionan. Uno de ellos es el de belleza. Según Javiera Eyzaguirre, “hoy en día es un concepto más abierto, más libre y subjetivo, en un momento donde los cánones de belleza están cambiando, estamos construyendo desde nuestra identidad, desde un espacio más comprometido, más auténtico y valiente (…)”. Si bien la forma de mostrar un cosmético, un perfume, una mujer cambió muchísimo, “pienso que aún estamos en un pequeño comienzo de ese cambio. (…) “Es decir, que ya basta de hacer analogías desde la mirada antigua de lo femenino para representar estos elementos (…).

LA EVOLUCIÓN DE LA PUBLICIDAD

Según Claudia Abend, “felizmente todo está cambiando muy rápido. La publicidad de toda la vida, esa tan ‘de mentira’, que vendía invariablemente a través de un mismo modelo de personas, ya casi no existe. Hoy se busca y se incentiva la diversidad y la inclusión cada vez más. Tanto que empezamos a sentir ridículo aquel mundo (para nada lejano en el tiempo), en el cual filmábamos siempre las caras que representan los parámetros de belleza que también están poco a poco siendo derribados”. (…)

Fuente: www.latinspots.com

TEXTO MAPEADO

TEXTO LOCUTADO

Lessons at a glance

Exploramos la lengua

On these pages, learners actively observe the language—through texts or other materials—and use it in a guided way. This way, we discover the function of the language through its different aspects (morphologic, lexical, syntactic, functional, textual, etc.) and we reinforce our explicit understanding of grammar.

In addition, we will learn how to be more autonomous, to effectively approach texts, to ask ourselves questions about the language and seek out the answers, and to build our own learning process. All of this has its benefits in class, of course, but the benefit is even greater outside the classroom when we encounter texts and other materials in Spanish in "the real world".

Students will work with short texts where they’ll encounter the material they need to learn and understand; the first step always consists of contextualized comprehension. The following steps guide the students to observe the phenomenon in question and actively build their grammatical understanding

Tutoriales de gramática

refer to video tutorials about grammar topics from the chapter.

The Más información box provides supplementary information of sociocultural or linguistic interest .

Commonly practiced activities in this section include: completing verb paradigms or simple grammatical rules, validating conclusions, performing small yet purposeful tasks to call upon linguistic resources, and expressing things that have personal meaning

Comunicamos

This section is dedicated to linguistic and communicative practice and includes suggestions for a wide range of activities. Learners will experiment with the functionality of the language through communicative “microtasks” where the content of the

lesson comes alive. Many of the activities are based on our background and experiences as people, as learners, and as part of a group; this is how we use our own experiences and perception of our environment to carry out real, purposeful communicative interactions.

The activities make it possible to practice the contents of the lesson in a personal, meaningful way; this shows the student that they are capable of producing intelligent statements of their own which are closely tied to their realities

As in the rest of the lesson, students are provided with samples of language that encourage them to jump in and speak or take the necessary steps to meet the task’s objectives.

Lessons at a glance

Conectamos nuestras culturas: Texto

The sections CONECTAMOS NUESTRAS CULTURAS: TEXTO and CONECTAMOS NUESTRAS CULTURAS: VIDEO are designed to bring us closer to Spanishspeaking cultures from a multifaceted perspective that is free from generalization and stereotypes. The topics are connected to the content of the lesson, but the approaches are diverse.

Again, this is about providing us with the opportunity to become familiar with Spanish-speaking cultures and also compare and relate them to our own while using engaging materials.

In addition, AULA EN ACCIÓN offers students the unique feature of Textos locutados y mapeados. The mapping of these texts identifies three different linguistic features: connectors, frequently combined words, and verb combinations Textos locutados are a fantastic source of s amples of different variations of Spanish. Students can use them to focus on pronunciation, to compare, and to appreciate linguistic variation

The activities in this section aim to have students take a critical look at cultural products, practices, and perspectives

Conectamos nuestras culturas: Video

Every lesson presents a video with the objective of developing audiovisual competency in Spanish. How so?

• By offering a wide variety of genres, which will help us become familiar with different audiovisual languages.

• By presenting material from a variety of origins, which allows us to come into contact with the linguistic and cultural richness of different Spanish-speaking countries

• By proposing comprehension activities which focus on meaning.

This section offers a wide variety of audiovisual genres: interviews, documentaries, short films, a mockumentary, and advertising campaigns.

Pronunciamos

This section offers explanations and pronunciation activities specially designed to help English-speaking students with those issues that they often have trouble with or cause them to experience difficulty

when communicating. We become aware of these “challenges” and learn fundamentals through two approaches: comparison with their native language and practice using audio recordings

The Pronunciamos section offers audio activities, with different Spanish varieties, that provide students with opportunities to develop their listening and speaking skills.

The Cápsula de pronunciación is an animated video to help students work on intonation and pronunciation in a visual and intuitive way.

The Estrategia box offers learning strategies for comprehension, speaking, writing, memorizing, vocabulary expansion, and more.

Tarea final: ahora podemos…

In this section, following the model of the Can-Do statements, we present tasks that involve various skills that are summed up in a final product. These tasks may include:

• Periods of individual research, reflection or creation as well as group/pair work that requires collaboration and teamwork,

• Co-creation of texts; negotiation of form (and meaning),

• Brainstorming and presentations,

• Comments on the products of others (applying an active, critical view rather than passive),

• Correction and peer evaluation,

• Revision and re-elaboration of products based on the comments and constructive criticism received.

In general, these are activities that stimulate higher-order cognitive skills. We do not simply repeat statements or produce them automatically; we consciously create them to convey personal meaning. We focus on both what we want to convey and the best way to do so. By carrying out these activities, we are performing tasks that also are meaningful in our communities: presenting what our ideal neighborhood would be like, preparing a menu for a special occasion, putting together a program of weekend activities in our city for a certain type of visitor, etc.

The Tarea final: Ahora podemos... is a holistic task that integrates the Three Modes of Communication (interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational) and it pushes learners to actively engage in language production by synthesizing most of the content covered up to this point.

Lessons at a glance

Recursos lingüísticos: Gramática y comunicación

In AULA EN ACCIÓN, grammar is approached from an inductive perspective, that is, language structures are provided within meaningful texts which learners interact with in a communicative way. Later on, students are encouraged to observe and discover how a given linguistic structure works. Once students are engaged in understanding structures, they can verify their hypothesis in the Recursos lingüísticos section, specifically under Gramática y vocabulario. Alternatively, students can look at grammar explanations prior to coming to class and engage with the materials in the classroom by

connecting and predicting the targeted linguistic rules. The different grammar concepts are presented in the same order in which they appear in the lesson. Functional grammar diagrams, thorough explanations, and a multitude of examples help clarify the use of these grammar rules in context The presentation of the grammar explanations aims to provide acccuracy and clarity while always maintaining that grammatical phenomena must be described by emphasizing the meaning, the context in which they appear, and their communicative value.

The ¿Necesitas ayuda? box provides additional help with comprehension activities: explanations, translations, etc.

Lessons at a glance

Recursos lingüísticos: Vocabulario activo

This page serves as both review and reference thanks to a glossary that includes the most relevant words and expressions of the lesson next to their corresponding English translations. The vocabulary words were selected taking into account their significance in the lesson and their usability in communication

This section facilitates a view of the lexicon not as a list of words that students need to memorize, but terms that interact with others. Not only is the vocabulary organized by semantic fields with examples modeling its use, but they are also presented visually, in graphics or lexical maps.

This section presents lexical items logically and visually, putting special emphasis on frequent word combinations. The format of this presentation of words and expressions resembles how vocabulary is learned in an immersion environment. In addition, it facilitates learning via graphic organizers, mental mapping, images, outlines, etc.

The La variedad del español box provides information about the lexical differences between the different varieties of Spanish.

IPA: Textos escritos

This last section is dedicated to the comprehension of written texts and audiovisual materials and the creation of students’ own original texts. The development of comprehension and expression is carried out following a model similar to that of ACTFL’s IPA (Integrated Performance Assessment)

IPAs ask learners to use language for real purposes: writing a response to two letters expressing empathy, agreement or disagreement , posting an opinion on a social media site, writing a blog post about an environmental project… that is, they aim to generate genuine acts of communication

The IPA is used for evaluating student’s language in the three communicative modes that correspond to the communication standards in the ACTFL Standards for Foreign Language Learning.

The IPA: Textos escritos section offers the following authentic texts: an interview with a Bolivian Aymara activist, a blog with tips on effective brand creation, two readers’ letters from an Argentine newspaper, an article about traditional footwear, an interview with a streamer, and an interview with writer Enrique Jaramillo Levi.

The Spanish Hub is a platform offering digital content and resources for students and instructors who work with AULA EN ACCIÓN.

It is designed with a clear purpose in mind: to improve

and learning experiences in higher education

with engaging content and helpful, userfriendly tools.

It offers easy access to a vast array of material in different formats to help students better grasp and practice concepts, build their skills, develop cultural insights, and meet learning objectives. These resources include online homework, grammar and pronunciation tutorials, cultural and vocabulary maps and assessment materials.

Textbook

The Interactive Textbook is a full html version of the textbook which can be used to complement the hardcopy version or used instead of the hard copy (both in face-to-face and online classes).

The Interactive Textbook offers in-class and out-of-class content and activities. It is browser-friendly with sizeadaptable pages and a format that functions on any desktop or tablet. It also offers a wide variety of resources making it more flexible than a classic printed textbook. In individual activities, students may write directly in the writing fields or, when more space is needed, they can attach files. There are note-taking options which may be used and corrected in class.

A modern and interactive version of a classic SAM (Student's Activities Manual). Students will be able to practice and expand upon the content and skills introduced in the textbook. Most exercises are auto corrected, particularly those with the main objective of learning and reviewing grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension, phonetics, and culture.