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  • Teaching Spanish Grammar with Pictures, CD-ROM: How to Use William Bull’s Visual Grammar of Spanish, and: En una palabra, Puebla, México, a CD-ROM for Exploring Culture in Spanish
  • Deborah Gill
Whitley, M. Stanley, and Patricia V. Lunn. Teaching Spanish Grammar with Pictures, CD-ROM: How to Use William Bull’s Visual Grammar of Spanish. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2010. ISBN 978-1-58901-703-0.
Paris-Bouvret, Emmanuel, Ana Pérez-Gironés, and Octavio Flores-Cuadra. En una palabra, Puebla, México, a CD-ROM for Exploring Culture in Spanish. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2010. ISBN 978-1-58901-647-7.

The two CD-ROM programs referenced above provide exceptional materials for use in the classroom to promote second-language acquisition and cultural knowledge. Both of these CD-ROMs are published by Georgetown University Press and provide, with the purchase, the ability to post onto a secure network the program and/or images for student use and, in the case of Teaching Spanish Grammar with Pictures, the use of the images on handouts.

Teaching Spanish Grammar with Pictures is a CD-ROM which precisely explains and demonstrates with examples how to use William Bull’s Visual Grammar of Spanish (VGS). The CD-ROM contains: 1) all of the Bull images (406) in .jpg and .pdf formats, 2) an image index, and 3) a Teacher’s Manual in .pdf format.

The first chapter of the Teacher’s Manual is divided into six subsections. In the first one, an explanation of William Bull’s Visual Grammar of Spanish and his intention behind the images (“to improve comprehension of Spanish grammar”) are presented. The next two subsections discuss William Bull’s background and provide a detailed explanation of his three key ideas: “1. Linguistics have neglected or ignored the role of meaning in their concentration on form. 2. Learning another language is learning another way to structure the world. 3. A unit’s function and meaning are defined by means of its contrasts within a given system” (4). The fourth subsection is broken into two parts. The first part discusses Bull’s idea of using images to teach concepts and presents a brief outline and explanation of the grant support that he received from UCLA and the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to realize his vision. The second part in this section provides a concise explanation of why Bull’s book Spanish for Teachers was written and what the focus was.

The fifth subsection in chapter 1 of the Teacher’s Manual provides a brief history of language teaching methods, from audiolingualism in the 1950s and 60s to a paradigm shift in 1970s to a more communicative method. In the final subsection, the authors stress that neither a contrastive structures approach to language learning nor VGS will produce automatic fluency. The authors provide example activities which promote the learning of a foreign language, including the use of VGS images, with the purpose of showing that as “opposed to traditional explanations of grammar, VGS helps students grasp a distinction and process it better in further input” (15).

Chapter 2 is the meat of the Teacher’s Manual. It is divided into two subsections, with the first subsection providing information on how to use the images inside and outside of the classroom, as well as its use with visually impaired students and heritage learners. The second subsection contains commentary on the use of each one (or sets) of the 406 VGS images. The authors provide excellent suggestions on how to present and use the images individually and in [End Page 184] sets, including cross-referencing images with others found either earlier or later in the group of images and research supporting the explanations. The authors remind the reader that it is necessary for individual teachers to take the time to correlate the images with their specific textbooks.

The third part of the Teacher’s Manual is an Appendix of the VGS images by topic. The authors have provided clear and concise headings for the images (and captions for each image) which parallel the commentary which was provided in chapter 2.

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