Spanish Internet Guide
Getting Started :-)

 

Dear Student:

Welcome to the Spanish Internet Guide! This Web page is intended to give you a basic understanding of what the Spanish Internet Guide (SIG) is and how it can facilitate the process of learning Spanish. If you are new to computers and/or the Internet, this Web page will also provide you with some useful suggestions for working with the lessons throughout the SIG.

 

Quick Access Menu:

Introduction

How it works

Lesson Outline

Suggestions

Final Remarks

Introduction

One of the main goals of intermediate Spanish is to help you improve your ability to read and comprehend authentic Spanish language texts. This means that instead of reading simplified or "doctored up" texts, you will be working with material written by and for native Spanish speakers. The activities you find in the Spanish Internet Guide (SIG) have been designed to assist you in meeting this challenge. By offering you guidance in accessing authentic Spanish language material on the World Wide Web, the SIG lessons will allow you to experience current cultural information pertaining to the Spanish speaking world.

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How it works

Important! When you first arrive at a given lesson, be sure to type your name and e-mail address at the top of the yellow Web page. Simply erase the "John Doe" information by highlighting it with the mouse and typing your Name and E-mail on in the appropriate places. If you forget to do so, your instructor will not know whose work it is.

While working through the SIG lessons, you will respond to questions by clicking on radio buttons and check boxes as well as typing your answers in blank fields when open-ended responses are called for.

When you finish a lesson, simply type your instructor's E-mail address, and click the button marked . This will cause two things to happen simultaneously. (1) The computer will process your answers and e-mail them to your instructor. (2) The computer will display a Web page confirming what you submitted. Once the confirmation page is visible on your screen, you may save it to a diskette or print it out for your records. Note that if you tell it to print before clicking the "Entregar" button, you will get a printout of the lesson, but the answers you typed in may be invisible to the computer. That is, althought they appear on the screen, they might not exist as printable content.

It is up to your instructor to determine how your work will be evaluated, but in general your grade on a lesson should reflect how much effort you put into completing it.

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Lesson Outline

Each lesson is divided into four sections:

1. ¡A saber!

The first section contains pre-reading activities to orient you to the lesson theme.

 

2. ¡A leer!

Here you will find a short text copied from a Web site and glossed with clickable words whose definitions will appear below in the "Glosario" frame. There are also comprehension check questions after the reading.

 

3. ¡A discutir!

The purpose of this section is for you to gather information from various Web sites and brainstorm ideas for the fourth component (see below). You will be given a task to complete along with a list of relevant Web sites for you to consult in order to do the task. (See detailed suggestions below for working with these Web sites.)

 

4. ¡A escribir!

In the last section, you will respond to a writing prompt. Your composition need not be extremely long, but it should demonstrate that you have understood and synthesized the information found at the Web sites listed in the previous section.

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Suggestions

I hope the following tips will be useful in helping you work with the SIG in a productive way:

You will notice that there is a shortcut to the "Entregar" button halfway through each lesson. It is located just after the second section (¡A leer!). So if you are unable to complete the whole lesson in one sitting, you can simply submit it in two parts. Actually, you can submit one part at a time if you like! But beware, your instructor might not appreciate having to deal with, say, more that 2 or 3 e-mails per student per SIG lesson.

 

Each time you click on a hyperlink in the ¡A discutir! section, a new window will open on top of the existing one in which you were working. To move it out of the way, click on the top part of the title bar (shown here in blue), hold the mouse down, and drag the new window out of the way.

When you are done exploring the website in this new window, close it by:

A. Either double clicking in the upper left corner or single clicking the X in the upper right corner (Windows 95)

-- or --

B. Clicking the upper left corner of the window (Macintosh).

By following the above suggestion, the window in which you had typed your work will then be visible and you can continue on with the assignment.

Caution: If you click the "Back" button in the window that popped up on top of the original one, you will merely travel back within that window. It may appear as if your typed work has disappeared, but what you are looking at is a fresh window. By closing that window, as described above, your original window will be there with all of your work intact.

Final remarks:

The Spanish Internet Guide, like many things you will find on the Internet, is non-static by design and in nature. The authors have worked very hard to locate URLs (Web site addresses) that are reliable (i.e. stable) for you to explore. If you should find that a particular Web site seems to be "down", go back and try to access it again. If it still won't load, simply try it again later. It may just be temporarily down. However, it is sometimes the case that as Web sites are modified and updated, the URLs themselves are changed. We will do our best to make the necessary modifications to the SIG to keep up with such changes. In the event that a site appears to be down for a very long time, kindly let us know.

As alluded to above, the SIG is continually evolving to better meet your needs as intermediate level learners of Spanish. We openly welcome your feedback and suggestions as you work through the various lessons. We hope you have an enriching experience as you travel "virtually" throughout the Spanish-speaking world!

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