Bill Worden, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Spanish
Director of Spanish Programs
The University of Alabama
Dr. Bill Worden is an Associate Professor of Spanish and the Director of
Spanish Programs in the Department of Modern Languages and Classics
at The University of Alabama.
Dr. Worden received his A.B. in Mathematics
from Dartmouth College in 1985 and subsequently taught high school Spanish
for five years in Illinois and Massachusetts. After studying in both Vermont and
Madrid, he received his M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College in 1996.
As a doctoral student at Brown University, Dr. Worden was awarded the David and Ruth Kossoff Prize for Leadership
in Language Teaching by the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching
by the Graduate School.
He also was chosen by fellow graduate students to give the address at the Graduate School
commencement ceremony. In 2002, Dr. Worden received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown.
Since 2002, Dr. Worden has taught a wide variety of courses at The University of Alabama, ranging from Introductory
Spanish and Advanced Grammar and Composition to undergraduate and graduate courses in 16th- and 17th-century
Spanish literature.
He has directed doctoral dissertations on colonial Latin American literature, early modern Spanish
literature, and 20th-century Latin American literature.
Dr. Worden’s main area of research is the work of Miguel de Cervantes, especially his novel Don Quixote.
Dr. Worden
has published in the fields of early modern Spanish literature, colonial Cuban theater, and 19th-century Spanish
literature. He also has published on pedagogical topics, including how to teach Spanish at the middle school and high
school levels and how to help undergraduate students make connections to Don Quixote. In addition, Dr. Worden is an
award-winning speaker who has lectured on such subjects as the prose of Cervantes, early modern Spanish poetry,
and approaches for helping beginning language students become comfortable speaking Spanish.
For a number of years,
Dr. Worden served The University of Alabama’s Department of Modern Languages and
Classics as the Director of the Spanish Language Program and was responsible for supervising all graduate teaching
assistants and instructors of introductory- and intermediate-level Spanish courses. In 2013, the Alabama Association of
Foreign Language Teachers selected Dr. Worden as the winner of the annual Outstanding Foreign Language Teacher
Award for Postsecondary.
■
Dr. Laura Rojas-Arce, author of the workbook and coauthor of the speaking activities, grew up in Costa Rica,
where she studied psychology as an undergraduate student at the Universidad Hispanoamericana in Heredia. She
completed her doctoral studies with a focus on contemporary Central American literature and received her Ph.D. from
The University of Alabama in 2013. Dr. Rojas-Arce is an Instructor of Spanish at The University of Alabama, where
she teaches courses ranging from Introductory Spanish and Advanced Grammar and Composition to courses on Latin
American literature. ■
This course introduces learners to the Spanish language and the cultures of the Spanish-speaking world.
Because the course is designed for learners with no previous experience with the language, the lessons begin
with the building blocks of Spanish: the alphabet, the proper pronunciation of consonant and vowel sounds,
and greetings and responses to greetings.
As you move forward in the course, you will be introduced to a variety of
fundamental grammar topics, ever-increasing vocabulary lists, and cultural information that will teach you about the
countries in the world where Spanish is spoken and help you understand how to use the grammar and vocabulary you
will learn about in their proper cultural context.
The purpose of this course is not simply to teach you about Spanish, but rather to develop your language skills so
that you can communicate successfully in the language. For that reason, the course includes a variety of components
designed to allow you to practice and improve your abilities in reading, writing, speaking, and understanding spoken
Spanish.
This course exposes learners to a variety of cultural aspects in the Spanish-speaking world, both in the video lessons
and in the Cultural Readings that are found in the workbook. In terms of the grammar and vocabulary presented in
the 30 lessons, this course covers the equivalent of what is taught in a first-semester Spanish course in college.
You
will find extensive grammar and vocabulary information in the various sections of the workbook. In addition, you might
wish to consult any standard introductory Spanish textbook for reference.
Throughout the course, you will learn more than a thousand of the most commonly used words in Spanish and become
acquainted with a number of important cultural aspects of the Spanish-speaking world. In terms of grammar, you will
learn how to form the present tense of all verbs, as well as the present progressive construction, which is used to
talk about something happening right now. You will be able to talk about future events in two different ways and to
use several expressions that talk about past events. Moreover,
you will learn how to conjugate and use one past
tense—the preterite tense—for all verbs. Your ability to express yourself with verbs will be accompanied by a growing
competence in using, for example, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs—all the necessary linguistic tools that will allow
you to communicate successfully in Spanish. This course offers the requisite linguistic and cultural knowledge that will
allow you to make the necessary first steps toward achieving communicative competence in Spanish.
■Welcome to the workbook for Learning Spanish: How to Understand and Speak a New Language. The
exercises included here are designed to help develop your reading and writing skills in Spanish while you
practice the vocabulary and grammar presented in the lessons. This introduction briefly explains how this
workbook fits in with the other components that accompany this course so that you’ll know how best to make use of all
of them to help develop your Spanish skills.
When you finish watching one of the 30 lessons, you should next listen to the audio glossary, which will give you the
pronunciation and definition of all the new vocabulary words. Then, it will be time to practice what you’ve learned. The
speaking activities that follow the audio glossary are designed to help you improve your listening and speaking skills,
and the exercises in this workbook will allow you to practice your reading and writing skills. You can decide if you
want to do the speaking activities before or after you do the workbook exercises, but you should do both of these only
after watching the lesson and listening to the audio glossary.
In addition to the exercises accompanying each lesson,
you will find the Grammar Reference, Glossary by Topic, Glossary of Cognates, Spanish-English Glossary, EnglishSpanish Glossary, and Resources for Further Study at the end of the workbook
.
Each section of this workbook begins with New Vocabulary, a listing of new words in the same order as they are
presented in the audio glossary. Next, the General Review section summarizes the material covered in the lesson,
allowing you to review grammatical, cultural, or vocabulary-related content. Then, you will find the Activities, which
offer practice with the new grammar and vocabulary.
At the end of every workbook section, you will find the Correct
Answers, which will allow you to check your work. In addition to the Activities included after every lesson, this workbook
also contains six Cultural Readings about different aspects of Latin American culture.
The Activities in this workbook are contextualized in a series of short stories dealing with several families and their
friends and neighbors. These families live in Villa Celeste [Celestial Town], a neighborhood somewhere in Latin
America. The principal characters in the stories are the Cortés Ruiz family, the Quirós GarcÃa family, and the González
Fallas family.
The Cortés Ruiz family has three sons, and the Quirós GarcÃa family has two daughters and a son.
Those two families also have two very young granddaughters. The González Fallas family, who just recently moved to
the neighborhood, has a son and a daughter. You will find the family trees for these families following this introduction.
Most of the words used in the Activities will be ones you will have already been introduced to in the course. When this
is not the case, the workbook will give the English for the Spanish word.
The six Cultural Readings do indeed include
vocabulary and grammar you will have already seen in the course. But they also purposely include some material a
bit beyond your current level of comprehension. This will force you to make some educated guesses while reading—a
very useful skill for a language learner. You won’t need to recognize every word or expression in a reading to gain a
good understanding of it. The English translation for the Cultural Readings can be found after the Correct Answers, so
you will be able to see how well your understood what you read.
And now, it’s time to get to work. Or, as we would say in Spanish: ¡A trabajar! [Let’s work!]. ■
to download the pdf from here :
https://www.kanopystreaming.com/sites/default/files/learningspanish.pdf
