Rumbos (Available Titles iLrn: Heinle Learning Center)

Jill Pellettieri is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Santa Clara University. Her areas of expertise include second language acquisition, computer-assisted language learning, and second language writing. In addition to RUMBOS and other Spanish instructional texts and materials, she also authors the best-selling PLAZAS Workbook.

"This book took me completely by surprise. It is unquestionably and far and away the best intermediate Spanish textbook I've seen. The organization is excellent and the grammar explanations clear and in-depth, but it is the fresh approach to structure and vocabulary learning that will make this textbook very important. It offers readings, reading strategies and techniques, writing strategies, and information on literary genre, styles, and types integrated into and throughout the entire work. The materials used in grammar explanations are often authentic, far more so than usual, and varied in type and the entire work of a chapter, in terms of vocabulary building and grammar learning, is organized around the readings or reading themes. This is contextualized learning and it is successful, far beyond anything else I have seen in intermediate textbooks. It is the kind of work students at the intermediate can easily do guided by such materials and it is the kind of work that will prepare them properly for the third year."

"I found that the writing activities in this book are very well designed. They are in context and they give students the possibility to create with the target language as well as to recycle vocabulary and structures. I am glad that you are incorporating ATAJO."

"The authors should be commended for creating a nice balance among literary pieces, journalistic readings and realia. The reading strategies are presented in a logical order and serve to guide students when reading a text for the first time. RUMBOS provides the students with important reading strategies, such as skimming, scanning, recognizing cognates, using the main idea to anticipate content, determining narrative voices and points of view, etc.) that will surely help them succeed in third year literature courses at the university level."

"I truly enjoyed reading the four chapters that were sent to me. In the first chapter I was impressed by the easy flow of the whole chapter. It starts with the topics that will be covered in the chapter, the structures that students will learn, and the additional topics of conversation."