Student's Experience
Portales 2.0 offers a contextualized learning experience and is designed to keep students engaged every step of the way.
Portales 2.0 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”
“Overall I had a positive experience with Portales because it is very accessible and easy to work with.”
Portales is unique in the organization and delivery of lesson content. Each color-coded strand features a learning progression that contextualizes the learning experience for students by breaking lesson content into comprehensible, manageable portions.
Portales 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.
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.
Embedded in the Vocabulary Tutorials, Speech Recognition helps students focus their time on the words they need to learn, for more efficient study and faster learning.
Interactive Pronunciation Tutorials require students to engage with the material via interactive quick checks throughout each tutorial.
Listen and Repeat asks students to repeat dialogue from the Fotonovela video, and gives feedback on production of longer phrases.
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 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.
The Portales video collection offers a myriad of media and video content types:
The different video inputs found in Portales provide unique accents, unique discourse, and unique points of view of the Spanish-speaking world.
Student diagnostics found throughout Portales provide with opportunities to review the vocabulary or grammar in the lesson, in order to focus study time on challenging topics.
is a self-check activity that provides students with low-stakes diagnostic opportunities for vocabulary and each grammar point.
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.
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.“
“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.”
For a detailed look at the program, access to a digital library of documents, and materials for instructional review, request your Virtual Sample now.
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