Taller de escritores: Grammar and Composition for Advanced Spanish (review)

Taller de escritores is a textbook designed for advanced Spanish language learners to develop their writing, reading, and speaking abilities in the target language. The text can be used in any third- or fourth-year college Spanish course focusing on conversation and composition, advanced grammar, or composition and reading.

Each of the six chapters focuses on a different kind of writing: description, narration, the narrative essay, argumentation, exposition, and the academic paper. The culmination of each unit is a series of writing workshops that allow students to practice the various writing styles. The authors of Taller de escritores lead students gradually to the production stage of the writing process through a series of steps that help to build vocabulary, grammar skills, and confidence prior to the final writing exercises.

The chapters begin with a photograph and a quote that serve to unleash the students' imagination and help them make a preliminary connection to the type of writing being addressed. For many beginning language learners, visual prompts are invaluable for building connections between words and context. At higher levels, this same technique can lead to richer language production on the part of the students. In brainstorming activities such as these, students will take more risks and be more fluid with vocabulary production, knowing that they are being encouraged to be as open and creative as possible.

The lesson openers are followed by short readings in the styles of writing addressed in the chapters. The authors keep the readings brief in order to allow students to read them multiple times and from different perspectives. By managing the length of the selections, instructors are able to reinforce contextual reading rather than direct translation. Throughout the readings, valuable marginal annotations in Spanish deepen the students' understanding of the readings, the uses of grammar within the readings, and the types of writing being used. These marginal notes are an integral resource that helps students in the later writing workshops. Students are also given footnotes with translations of certain words that may hinder comprehension. These footnotes help students build new vocabulary without impeding contextual reading.

The language workshops that follow the short readings are titled "Léxico," "Estructuras," and "Ortografía y puntuación." These workshops reinforce and expand students' knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and usage in context. The "Léxico" section introduces vocabulary that is related to the grammar exercises and the type of writing being addressed in the individual chapters. The "Estructuras" section is where the main grammar points of the chapters are addressed. The only potential drawback to this section is that, while the rest of the text is written in Spanish, the grammar explanations are written in English. For this level of instruction, students should be able to manage grammar explanations in the target language. Nevertheless, the exercises that accompany "Estructuras" are extremely well designed, building in difficulty from fill-in-the blank and matching exercises to exercises that require students to rewrite or compose sentences. This approach moves students from demonstrating a basic understanding of a grammar principle to being able to apply it in their own writing. In "Ortografía y puntuación," students learn, among other things, the rules for accentuation, how to form compound words, and when to use commas, colons, and semicolons. The exercises in this section also move students from an awareness and understanding of language skills to their actual application.

The final section of each chapter is the writing workshop where students are given the opportunity to write in the style of the chapter. Instead of restricting students to one main writing exercise, the authors present three different writing activities, each with a slightly different focus. In each writing exercise, students are given a sample of the writing style in question, and then, using the skills they have developed in the preceding sections of the chapter, they brainstorm their topic in a prewriting activity. They then write a rough draft and a...