Por mi mism@

Por mí mism@ was designed for students of advanced intermediate Spanish. The content areas were selected to raise the learners' proficiency to a level that will enable them to successfully transition to advanced grammar and writing courses.

We have integrated several pedagogical approaches, but our main goal in creating this book was to give students the necessary tools to take responsibility for their own language development. Therefore, Por mí mism@ encourages learners to discover vocabulary and induce grammatical rules on their own; hence, the title of the book. 

Keeping in mind the importance of learning styles, we have incorporated a variety of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities to satisfy the needs of a wide range of students. Various sections of Por mí mism@ have been influenced by Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983, 1993, 1999). We have included activities that aim to stimulate learning through the use of senses, emotions, and imagination. Developing interpersonal, intrapersonal, logical-mathematical, visual, and musical intelligence is one of the objectives of the introductory activity of each chapter: "Dejate volar". 

Since motivation is an essential factor in successful language learning, we have designed activities that include humor as well as a variety of thought-provoking and controversial topics relevant to life in the 21st century. Students will also encounter a range of discourse genres: interviews, blogs, informative articles, etc. These texts also represent a variety of countries in order to familiarize students with dialectal variation, thus improving their ability to recognize unfamiliar structures and lexicon. 

Each chapter contains substantial input and output via both written and oral activities. Students will have an opportunity to work alone, in pairs and in groups, depending on the specific objectives of the task at hand. Simply stated, interaction among classmates is a driving force of  Por mí mism@.