Bill VanPatten,
Texas Tech University James F. Lee,
University of New South Wales (Australia) Terry L. Ballman,
California State University, Channel Islands Andrew P. Farley,
Texas Tech University
ISBN: 0073385220 Copyright year: 2010
Feature Summary
Vistazos is highly innovative yet extremely practical in its task-based approach. Rather than asking students to do activities that are contrived or have no context, Vistazos asks students to use their Spanish to complete specific —and practical— goals or tasks. For example, a task might involve interviewing another student to create an information sheet for the instructor. The benefit to this approach is that students stay engaged in the activities and derive a greater sense of accomplishment and purpose from them.
Vistazos represents the practical application of the theories and research presented in Lee and VanPatten’s methods text Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen. It is a natural companion volume for additional support in teaching with Vistazos
The activities in Vistazos are unique in that students must understand what the content means in order to complete them. In other words, there is no purely mechanical practice (substitution drills, strict verb conjugations, and so forth) in the text.
By organizing the main lessons into thematic units (5 units of 3 lessons each), Vistazos offers students and instructors more opportunities to recycle and reinforce the vocabulary presented.
Vistazos is uniquely and conveniently organized into sections called Vistazos I, II, and III, each of which includes just the right amount of material to cover in one 50-minute class. This organization makes syllabus planning a breeze!
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