The philosophy of this best-selling introductory text is to emphasize communicative proficiency. Based on the Natural Approach, the text stresses the use of activities in a natural and spontaneous classroom atmosphere. In this comprehension-based approach, the development of receptive skills listening and reading precedes and forms the basis for the development of the productive skills speaking and writing. "Dos mundos" is designed so that class time can be devoted to exposing students to Spanish through the abundant activities and readings in the text, allowing the grammar explanations and exercises to be studied outside of class.

Dos mundos, a best-selling program for Introductory Spanish known for its exceptional progressive activities, made its name as an innovative pioneer in Beginning Spanish. Today, it has maintained the spirit of innovation through many successful editions and continues to be implemented in numerous beginning Spanish language classes across the nation with outstanding results. Based on the communicative approach, Dos mundos stresses the use of engaging activities in a natural and spontaneous classroom atmosphere. The Actividades de comunicacion play a primary role in Dos mundos, since the core of the program is communication. These activities include fresh, practical ideas from the field of second-language teaching. In this research-based approach to learning language, the development of communicative language skills is the central goal, with formal grammar presentation and practice at the service of communication. To this end, the grammar explanations and exercises on the blue pages at the end of each chapter are designed for quick reference and ease of study. Additionally, cultural content is integrated throughout each chapter. The new Conozca section on each chapter opener gives an introduction of the country or region of focus, including information about holidays, foods, famous people, and important cities. Ventanas culturales readings focus on community, customs, and daily life while Ventanas al pasado readings focus on aspects of the social, cultural, or political history of the Spanish-speaking world The Enlace readings explore literature, music, and cinema, and the Lecturas present topics such as sports and leisure activities.

If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.

To reason is to talk. To think is to use tools. To learn is to join a community of practice. This book explores thought and reasoning as inherently social practices, as actions situated in specific environments of demand, opportunity, and accountability. Authors from diverse disciplines - psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology - examine how people think and learn in settings as diverse as a factory, a classroom or an airplane cockpit. The tools that people use in these varied settings are both physical technologies and cultural constructions: concepts, structures of reasoning, and forms of discourse. This volume in the NATO Special Programme on Advanced Educational Technology is based on an international conference on situated cognition and learning technologies.

Writing New Worlds analyses the different ways in which travel literature constituted a fundamental pillar in the production of knowledge in the modern era. The impressive frequency of publication and the widespread circulation of translations and editions account for the leading and essential contribution of travel literature for a better understanding and awareness about the dynamics and practices associated with decoding and making sense of the prose of the world. These texts, in some cases accompanied by illustrations, covered a broad and extensive panoply of languages, grammars and ways of seeing, translating and writing new worlds. In drawing special attention to internationally less-studied sources from Portugal and Germany, the book shows how authors, scholars and artists between the 15th and 17th centuries responded to the challenges of modernity, and explores the cultural dynamics involved in grasping and understanding the New.