This book is a comprehensive one-stop guide for students intending to embark on study or work in Spain for the first time. It provides background information on contemporary Spain, practical advice on the student experience covering accommodation, registration, and adapting to Spanish patterns of study, as well as information on joining the Spanish workforce. It also includes an extensive directory of Spain's 67 Universities and their locations.

Are you looking for an improver's course in Spanish which will make you sound like a native? If you already know some Spanish and want to take it further, Perfect your Spanish will guarantee success! Taking you from a good GCSE level (level B2 of the Common European Framework), this course teaches you advanced structures and vocabulary so that by the end of the course you will be at GCE Advanced Level, CEF level C1: Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Full of authentic texts and dialogues about complex subjects, this course covers a wide range of topics of the sort you will want to talk about when in Spain and teaches you the kind of everyday language and features of speech that will enable you to communicate with confidence and feel comfortable taking part in conversation with native speakers of Spain. The choice of material aims to give you something of the flavour of Spain today and each unit is based around a single theme with lively interviews and conversations on the accompanying recording. There are activities based on the interviews and texts to help you remember what you've learnt and put your knowledge into practice. The units are divided into sessions - to help you organize your learning time and break up the material into manageable chunks - and there are reminders throughout to refresh your memory of points you have learnt. Now fully updated to make your language learning experience fun and interactive. You can still rely on the benefits of a top language teacher and our years of teaching experience, but now with added learning features within the course and online. Learn effortlessly with new, easy-to-read page design and interactive features: NOT GOT MUCH TIME? One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. AUTHOR INSIGHTS Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience. GRAMMAR TIPS Easy-to-follow building blocks to give you a clear understanding. USEFUL VOCABULARY Easy to find and learn, to build a solid foundation for speaking. DIALOGUES Read and listen to everyday dialogues to help you speak and understand fast. TEST YOURSELF Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGE Extra online articles at: www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the culture and history of Spain. TRY THIS Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

This handbook deals with all aspects of contemporary language teaching and its history. Produced for language teaching professionals, it is also useful as a reference work for academic studies at postgraduate level.

New quantitative methodology and the development of corpus and experimental linguistics tools have recently made researching lexical comprehension and production more accessible. While several tools and data sets are available in English (Coh-metrix, CELEX) and a few other languages, the development of resources and empirical research is still lacking in Spanish. This volume brings together original empirical research and theoretical perspectives that examine lexical development in Spanish L1, L2 and L3, with a focus on different teaching approaches and textbook coverage of Spanish lexicon in L2 curricula and the use of corpus linguistics in methodological investigations. Some questions addressed include the role of lexical development in mapping grammatical acquisition phases, the potential transfers of L1 to L2 lexical abilities, the effect of explicit vocabulary learning techniques in L2, how affective meaning modulates L2 acquisition, or how a typological understanding of lexical organization can help in teaching more effectively the lexicon of a language, among many others. The book offers an overview of what is currently being done in the field of Spanish lexical acquisition through a myriad of approaches and topics.

The premise that intercultural contact produces intercultural competence underpins much rationalization of backpacker tourism and in-country language education. However, if insufficiently problematized, pre-existing constructions of cultural 'otherness' may hinder intercultural competence development. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist, and where such positionings may go unproblematized. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations through a detailed, multiple case study of three conceptually comparable contexts in which Western backpackers study Spanish in Latin America. This experience, often 'bundled' with home-stay, volunteer work, social, and tourist experiences, offers a rich set of empirical data within which to understand the nature of intercultural competence and the processes through which it may be developed. Models of a single, context-free, transferable intercultural competence are rejected. Instead, suggestions are made as to how educators might help prepare intercultural sojourners by scaffolding their intercultural reflections and problematizing their own intersectional identities and their assumptions. The study is a critical ethnography with elements of autoethnographic reflection. The book therefore also contributes to development of this qualitative research methodology and provides an empirical example of its application.