Punto Y Aparte Student Edition
Resumen del Libro
Punto y aparte began as a set of materials that the lead author, Sharon Foerster, created for the fourth-semester of Spanish at the University of Texas, Austin. After an initial custom-publishing version, it was then published as a mainstream Spanish title. It has since enjoyed great success, becoming the top-selling Spanish textbook for fourth-semester Spanish. What makes it stand apart from other intermediate Spanish books is its effectiveness in bridging the gap between low-intermediate and advanced Spanish. The title punto y aparte is a Spanish expression used to refer to the beginning of a new paragraph. Indeed, this program very successfully moves students from sentence level production to paragraph level production. It does so in part by providing an abundance of communicative tasks and activities, involving engaging, contemporary, and relevant cultural topics that are integrated throughout the chapter. Thus, students studying with this book can more easily break out of the second-year plateau and move into a more advanced level, towards fluency.The other unique characteristic of this book is its approach to grammar. Key grammatical structures (los puntos clave) are presented in a novel way, as tools for communication, rather than as ends in themselves. The authors have identified seven communicative functions or goals (las siete metas comunicativas) that are central to intermediate-level study. These functions are: By organizing the text around key communicative functions and the grammatical structures that support them, Punto y aparte, follows a logical and manageable progression. The continual reinforcement and recycling of all seven communicative functions offer students many opportunities to communicate, produce, and create with the language, rather than to simply review the
