Puntos (Student Edition) Standalone Book

It’s more than a text. It’s a program.

Success in the language classroom requires so much more than just a text. In any language-learning setting, students require numerous and various opportunities to read, write, hear, and speak.

Puntos de partida sets the standard for Spanish-language teaching. An innovative program that has been continuously refined for today’s classroom, Puntos delivers proven pedagogy with clear and effective presentations, comprehensive teaching resources, and powerfully adaptive digital tools.

Now in its anniversary Tenth Edition, Puntos builds on the holistic, five-skills approach it pioneered. It’s the Puntos you know. It’s the Puntos of today.

Puntos hallmark features include:

Engaging and Immersive Digital Tools:  Connect Spanish is the most powerful and flexible course management system available. Rooted in research on effective student learning practices, the platform integrates adaptive learning tools with dynamic, engaging language practice activities.  McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart provides each student with a personalized and adaptive learning experience based on individual needs.  Connect Spanish also provides the instructor with both the ability and flexibility to pull from the robust set of content available in the platform and craft a unique learning path based on the goals of the course. With Practice Spanish: Study Abroad, the market’s first 3-D immersive language game designed exclusively by McGraw-Hill, Puntos brings the language to the students in a fun, engaging, and immersive gaming experience.Students “study abroad” virtually in Colombia where they will create their very own avatar, live with a host family, make new friends, and navigate a variety of real-world scenarios using their quickly developing Spanish language skills.  The first and only analytics tool of its kind, Connect Insight is a series of visual data displays—each framed by an intuitive question—to provide instructors at-a-glance information regarding how your class is doing.  Connect Insight provides analysis on five key insights, available at a moment’s notice from your Connect course.

A Comprehensive scope and sequence: The comprehensive scope and sequence allows instructors to choose what to cover throughout the course without having to supplement their own materials to fill gaps present in other texts.

Carefully arranged organization: the overall organization carefully progresses from formulaic expressions to vocabulary and grammar relevant to daily life and personal interests (studies, family, home,leisure activities), then goes on to prepare students for survival situations(ordering a meal, traveling), and finally branches out to broader themes(current events, social and environment issues). This forward progress is reinforced by a cyclical structure where vocabulary, grammar, and language functions are continuously reviewed and recycled.

Clear and effective vocabulary and grammar presentations: Puntos’ approach to vocabulary and grammar focuses on the acquisition of vocabulary during the early stages of language learning and then at the start of each chapter throughout the text.Grammar is introduced in thorough explanations, with careful attention given to skills development rather than grammatical knowledge alone.  These explanations are now even more accessible to students, featuring conversational language, increased clarity,additional examples, and organization of complex, dense explanations into manageable chunks of concise grammar summary.

Integrated four-skills approach:  Puntos carefully sequences activities, moving students from controlled to free-form tasks. In the tenth edition, this overall scaffolding is improved and introduced at the individual activity level.Starting with the very first activity fol

Thalia Dorwick has taught at Allegheny College, California State University (Sacramento), and Case Western Reserve University, where she received her Ph.D. in Spanish in 1973. She has been recognized as an Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher by the California Foreign Language Teachers Association. Dr. Dorwick is the coauthor of several textbooks and the author of several articles on language teaching issues.

Ana María Pérez-Gironés is an adjunct Professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. She received a Licenciatura en Filología Anglogermánica from the Universidad de Sevilla in 1985, and her M.A. in General Linguistics from Cornell University in 1988. Her professional interests include second language acquisition and the integration of cultural competence and technology in language teaching

Anne Becher received her M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics in 1992 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she coordinates Beginning Spanish and teaches pedagogy and methods courses for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She has taught beginning through advanced levels of Spanish since 1996, including several years teaching Modified Spanish classes for students with difficulty learning languages.