A Spanish Grammar Workbook (review)

This very traditional workbook consists of pedagogical materials designed between 2000–2002 to teach undergraduates at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where the author is tutor and coordinator of Spanish language courses. Conceived to be used in conjunction with A comprehensive Spanish grammar by Jacques de Bruyne, adapted with additional material by Christopher J. Pountain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), it is a collection of 500 grammatical exercises of all kinds, including puzzles of various types, fill-ins, multiple-choice exercises, and tests. Students can check their answers with the key (284–364).

I would like to offer a number of suggestions to improve the quality of the learning experience. Let me begin with vocabulary. Rather than attempting to learn new lexemes in an inefficient manner, such as trying to wrestle with body-part terminology by examining letters in a large checkered box (13), I believe students would be much more enthusiastic and productive if the book supplied pictures, which create a more natural language-learning environment for this sort of task. Although English-speaking students will have few problems with musculos ‘muscles’ or estomago ‘stomach’, I see no alternative to rote memory for items such as ojos ‘eyes’ and pelo ‘hair’. However, the latter word in Spanish is not like its English equivalent in that pelo ‘hair on the head’ is distinguished from cabello ‘hair on the body’. In my experience, visual aids work wonders for helping students learn the names of concrete objects, although it must be admitted that, without a specific context, there would not be enough comprehensible input to facilitate complete language acquisition for most.

Turning to prepositions (88–99), whose intricacy usually renders them difficult to master in any foreign language, we find a number of drills, including: ‘Answer the following questions using appropriate prepositions’ (92). Since Spanish is noted for differences, when compared with English, in lexical particularization (witness ser and estar ‘to be’), one might reasonably expect two exercises devoted to the two prepositions por and para ‘for’ (91–92, 97). However, in an attempt to encourage fluency in prepositions, it seems to me that most students of any level will have severe difficulty with the ‘communicative exercise’ to ‘write or role-play a dialogue’ with correr ‘to run’ and correr con (98), for example, correr con los gastos ‘to take on the costs’ (my example).

Devoid of any communicative context, the exercises remind me of the situation in the 1960s when the audiolingual method (ALM) of foreign language teaching was in full swing. An entire page devoted to writing imperatives from various verbs is a remnant of this most unsuccessful teaching strategy (144). Numerous exercises are based on the ALM, such as ‘change the following sentences to the plural’ (63), ‘change the verbs that appear in brackets into the future tense’ (63), ‘rewrite the following sentences as negative imperatives’ (157), and ‘rewrite the sentences in the negative’ (247). ALM was unsuccessful, in my view, when it was in vogue, and is even more so in today’s applied linguistic climate in which communicative competence is considered paramount.

Finally, some linguistic statements that add precious little to our scientific or pedagogic knowledge could have been excised, for example, ‘The Spanish language is a living, breathing creature that is evolving differently in distinct areas of the globe’ (ix).