Spanish 201: Puertas y Puentes 1e

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Puertas y puentes uses a communicative approach to continue students' journeys as learners of Spanish and Hispanic Culture. With five main chapters and an ancillary chapter with additional activities, each chapter focuses on a different country and theme with complementing vocabulary and grammatical structures. While most traditional textbooks cover all the verb tenses, pronouns, subjunctive vs indicative, narration in the past, etc. in two semesters, we have found through decades of combined teaching experience that rushing students through a series of grammar points does not make them better communicators. Language acquisition takes time, and we prefer to focus on those skills that accompany the ACTFL Oral Proficiency scale. Our goal is for each student to be able to minimally speak at the intermediate-mid level, which means they can express their own meaning, talk about familiar subjects, and be comprehensible to native speakers who are used to communicating with language learners.