What's New - Portales 2.0 - Introductory Spanish

What’s New

New Fotonovela video

Fully integrated with the text, the new Fotonovela presents the adventures of a group of friends living in Madrid, Spain. Students will follow them through some of the greatest natural and cultural treasures of the Spanish-speaking world, while observing the highs and lows of everyday life.

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Student Portfolio

The new Student Portfolio is an integrated digital tool that allows students to curate a collection of work showcasing their language learning progress, growth, and achievements over time. These collections illustrate the student’s experience and the products of their learning, becoming meaningful through reflection, which facilitates students' understanding of their learning and what they can do with the language.

Measure and demonstrate proficiency growth by identifying skill gaps to enable improvement.
Export portfolios for future education, reflection, or employment opportunities.
Foster a sense of community with instructor and peer commenting.

Expanded video content encourages students to interact with the language

The videos serve to contextualize grammar topics, helping them develop an intercultural competency that deepens their language skills and includes:

Ten new En pantalla TV clips with authentic advertising and broadcast clips from different Spanish-speaking countries exposes students to a range of different dialects.
84 new Panorama cultural videos provide compelling visuals to accompany Panorama activities and brings the culture to life.

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The Project-Focused Learning Track improves student's research, language, and communication skills

Incorporated into every lesson, the Project-Focused Learning Track includes 15 assignable tasks. Students answer an essential question by completing an authentic task, such as developing a café menu. Through sustained investigation, reflection, and peer reviewed tasks, students engage in Spanish-language media exploration, while developing their personal interests and communication skills, and engaging with the global community.

Group and individual submission expand student production

Group Chat and Individual Recording Activities allow single or multiple students to record a video production exercise, providing instructors with more flexibility in creating and assigning activities to groups within their classes.

Group Chat offers valuable practice that simulates the conversations most typical to a language classroom. These activities also ready students for authentic communication with native speakers, which typically occurs in a group setting.

Art and illustration program

The updated art and illustration program is full of contemporary, diverse illustrations that place vocabulary into today’s social context and support inclusive teaching practices that tell diverse stories from a range of different perspectives.

Assignable Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs)

New assignable IPAs use authentic cultural content complete with rubric grading and video upload. These assessments measure student progress toward proficiency in the three modes of communication: Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational.

Communicative goals and Can-do Statements build student's confidence

Communicative goals are now listed at the beginning of each section. After the activities in that section, the “I can” statement reminds students which goal they achieved. At the end of the lesson, a summary of the communicative goals are achieved and a review activity for each goal is presented. Annotations to the Instructor indicate the correlation to the ACTFL standards.