Spanish teacher Holly Vivar looks over a class workbook. Photo by Heather KimBy Heather Carr, Staff Writer
After issuing the first notebooks last fall, Spanish teachers have collaborated to revise or add on to them in order to increase students’ proficiency of the language and their understanding of necessary materials for next year.
The decision to do so came after the teachers were notified that they were no longer receiving books from their former publisher. In response, the Spanish teachers chose to replace all of the activities in each workbook for the next year. They planned to lengthen those for the first and third level classes, while those for the Spanish 2 classes would be completely re-created by the department, with one workbook for each class per semester.
“While some of the workbook pages that need corrections have caused frustration, Spanish teachers are enthusiastic about updating our workbooks for next year and having an improved resource to help our students develop their Spanish proficiency,” said James Diecidue, the head of the department. “We’re excited to have improved workbooks for next year.”
A large portion of the revision will be directed towards correcting typos, such as changing “semester” to “semestre,” but teachers also hope to implement a greater variety of practices and to modernize the vocabulary lists.
However, modification will vary between classes. Collaborations between Spanish 1 and 3 teachers for modifications will continue this upcoming fall, while Spanish 2 teachers will finalize the updates for the workbooks this May.
“We hope to have the first semester workbooks updated by June, so we can have the workbooks printed over the summer,” said Diecidue. “The Spanish 1 and 3 workbooks will be very different and will include more reading activities and higher-level language skills. The changes to the Spanish 2 workbook will not be as significant, as we are not adding pages, but rather re-doing some of the existing pages.”
The teachers are excited to use the revised books for next year and believe that it will meet department expectations of what students should learn from those classes.
