Student Viewer 's Handbook to Accompany Destinos: Episodes 27-52 An Introduction to Spanish

"Destinos" is an innovative beginning Spanish program based on a 26-week television series that premiered on PBS in the fall of 1992. The 52 half-hour shows of the series use the powerful appeal of a uniquely Hispanic genre - the telenovela (soap opera) - to make language and culture come alive. The situation and context of each episode introduce students to the basic structures, language functions and vocabulary groups of Spanish that are presented in most introductory- and intermediate-level Spanish courses. Both volumes of this "Student Viewer's Handbook to Accompany Destinos, Second Edition", is designed to help instructors and students use "Destinos" as a supplement in a wide variety of courses, at beginning, intermediate, or advanced levels of instruction. By using the handbook, instructors and students will enjoy viewing the 52 half-hour episodes of the television series more and get more out of them. Also contained in the second edition of the handbook is additional information about the series characters, cultural information from around the Spanish-speaking world, and process writing tasks, all of which will enhance Spanish instruction at all levels.

About the Author :
Bill VanPatten is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chanpaign, where he is Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and the Advisor for the undergraduate program in Spanish teacher education. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. His areas of research are input and output processing in second language acquisition, the impact of instruction on second language acquisistion, and the acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. He teaches a wide range of courses from beginning Spanish to doctoral seminars on language acquisition. He has published numerous articles and chapters in books and is the co-author of several McGraw-Hill Spanish textbooks. He is also the designer of Destinos, a television course for PBS. Martha Alford Marks received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Co-author of 'Que tal? and Destinos, a Spanish video course, she also served on the Advisory Board to Boston PBS station WGBH during the development of the Destinos program, which was funded by the Annenberg Foundation. She is widely known as an ACTFL-certified oral proficiency tester and trainer in Spanish and ESL.L. Richard V. Teschner received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Spanish Linguistics. He has taught at UW-Parkside, the University of Iowa, and (since 1976) the University of Texas at El Paso, where in 1988 he became a full professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics. His publications include four edited anthologies, two book-length bibliographies, a placement exam, and a dictionary of Mexican-American Spanish, along with several editions of seven textbooks such as Espanol escrito: Curso para hispanohablantes bilingues; Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish; and Analyzing the Grammar of English: A Brief Undergraduate Textbook. He has published four dozen articles in professional journals along with an equal number of papers and keynote addresses. In 1988 he served as president of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and also of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest.