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Portales 2.0 Intermediate Spanish

Student Experience

Portales 2.0: Intermediate offers a contextualized learning experience and is designed to keep students engaged every step of the way.

“I really enjoyed using Portales and I think it really made a difference in how quickly I was able to learn Spanish.”

Yasmine Reis, Student, Madison Area Technical College

“Overall I had a positive experience with Portales because it is very accessible and easy to work with.”

Learning Progression

Student Learning Progression

Portales Intermediate is unique in its organization and delivery of lesson content. Each color-coded strand features a learning progression that contextualizes the experience for students by breaking lesson content into comprehensible, manageable portions.

Portales Intermediate guides students through the active learning steps that are required to learn a new language and provides a strong foundation for communicative language development in a class setting.

Tools that Strengthen Students’ Language Skills

Speech Recognition identifies student utterances in real-time and objectively determines whether a student knows the word—increasing student awareness of pronunciation. Speech recognition provides students with immediate feedback on their pronunciation, giving them more confidence to speak in the target language during class.

Vocabulary tutorials

Vocabulary Tutorials with speech recognition help students focus their time on the words they need to learn, for more efficient study and faster learning.

Pronunciation tutorials

Interactive pronunciation tutorials require students to engage with the material via interactive quick-checks throughout each tutorial.

Listen and Repeat

Listen and Repeat asks students to repeat dialogue from the Fotonovela video, and gives feedback on production of longer phrases.

Building Confidence and Proficiency

Students want to be able to communicate with others in their new language, to have meaningful and productive—not perfect—conversations. As a result, they need frequent and varied opportunities to engage in interpersonal communication activities in their learned language.

Portales Intermediate offers a wealth of communication tools—Partner Chat, Video Virtual Chat, and the new Group Chat—that help students lower their affective filter while providing meaningful opportunities for self-expression in authentic, real-life contexts.

 

Comprehensive Video Programs Build Student Confidence

The Portales Intermediate video collection offers a myriad of media and video content types:

  • Fotonovela is an episodic drama series that follows the adventures of a family and friends in Oaxaca, Mexico. The storyline bridges language and culture, providing a glimpse into the everyday life in the Spanish-speaking world.
  • Cinemateca features award-winning short fims by contemporary Hispanic filmmakers and the content is connected to the language and themes of the lesson.
  • Flash cultura videos feature young broadcasters from across the Spanish-speaking world sharing aspects of life related to each lesson’s theme.
  • En detalle features a dynamic web-enhanced presentation of the readings in El mundo hispano with audio-sync to engage 21st century learners.

The different video inputs found in Portales Intermediate provide unique accents, discourse, and points of view from the Spanish-speaking world.

Diagnostics

Student diagnostics found throughout Portales Intermediate provide with opportunities to review the vocabulary or grammar in the lesson, in order to focus study time on challenging topics.

Assessment

Autoevaluación is a self-check activity that provides students with low-stakes diagnostic opportunities for vocabulary and each grammar point.

Prueba de práctica is a multi-question practice test that provides students with a low-stakes opportunity for assessing their knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar points covered in each lesson.

Personalized Study Plan highlights areas where students need additional support and recommends remediation activities for completion prior to the lesson test.

“After the first week of my course, I felt as if I knew exactly how to manage Portales with ease. Portales has helped me strengthen my ability to read and write in Spanish. I am more confident in my abilities to conjugate verbs and to form sentences that I can use in my everyday life.“

Sara Karamat, Student, Lake Tahoe Community College

“In my three semesters of Spanish, Portales has been a supportive and interactive resource that has assisted me in gaining more confidence in learning a second language.”