This book is meant as a revision resource for GCSE Spanish. It can be used independently by students as well as for classroom practice. It contains 12 units which focus mainly on the themes of environment, health and career.
Units start with a knowledge organiser, recapping the the target sentence patterns and lexical items, a series of receptive vocabulary building activities; a set of narrow reading texts and activities; a set of translation tasks. The tasks are graded in order to pose an increasingly demanding but manageable cognitive load and challenge and are based on Dr Conti's P.I.P.O. framework:
- Pre-reading tasks (activation of prior knowledge & pre-teaching)
- In-reading tasks (intensive exploitation of tasks)
- Post-reading tasks (consolidation)
- Output (pushed-output tasks)
Consistent with Dr Conti's E.P.I. approach, each of the 12 units in the book provide extensive recycling of the target lexical items both within each unit and throughout the book, across all the dimensions of receptive and productive processing, i.e.: orthography (single letters and syllables), lexis (both words and chunks), grammar/syntax (with much emphasis on functional and positional processing), meaning and discourse.
The recycling occurs through input-flooding and forced retrieval through a wide range of engaging, tried and tested, classic Conti tasks (more than 20 per unit). These include student favourites such as slalom writing, faulty translation, spot the missing detail, sentence puzzles, etc.
