Books for Teachers

Instructional books for Teaching Spanish
The Spanish teacher’s book is a very important material that helps Spanish teachers to prepare their daily lesson plan for their Spanish class. Most Spanish reference books are developed by a cross functional team and feature entertaining stories, vocabulary lessons, cultural information, grammar explanations, exercises and illustrations.

The publishing companies use several terms to refer to Spanish teacher's books, among them are instructional books or guide books.

The teacher's book contains a didactic guide to develop the activities of the student book. This is an additional material with a relevant function in the process of teaching Spanish as a second language. The Spanish teacher applies the instructions of the Spanish language book freely, taking always into account the specific needs of each group of students.

There are several didactic guides that stand out because of their narrative style, brevity and concisiveness. The teacher's book should accomplish the following objectives:

• Help to develop didactic skills in Spanish classes
• Give additional cultural material as well as Spanish grammar, Spanish phrases and vocabulary
• Provide the solutions of the activities
• Offer different strategies and resources to teach
• Know the different types of students
• Help to prepare the course lesson plan

Spanish teachers agree that a Spanish book is much valuable when there is a didactic guide to help them understand the activities.

Books for learning Spanish
Among the major Spanish language and ESL educational textbook publishers are Sgel, SM, Edelsa, Difusión, Edinumen and Santillana. These companies are either specialized in Spanish for foreigners or have a division aimed at this field. Several of them account for their own Spanish method for foreigners adapted to the different levels that sets the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, and also publish many other additional Spanish language materials.

The Spanish methods most commonly used by Spanish teachers are:

• Sueña, Mañana y Vuela (Anaya)
• Prisma (Edinumen)
• Aula, Gente y Rápido rápido (Difusión)
• Bravo, bravo (Santillana)
• Antena (SGEL)

Regarding additional Spanish materials, there is a wide variety of textbooks; some of them are listed below:

1. Textbooks for specific purposes such as health, science, business or law.
2. There are also a number of Spanish methods designed to satisfy different needs and interests identified in the students’ native culture. In this sense there are methods designed for Japanese, British, and so on.
3. There are Spanish language books aimed for those who want to learn Spanish in Spain and others thought for those who want to learn Spanish in Latin America.
4. There are several learning Spanish methods for kids, teenagers or adults.
5. Some of them focus on a particular skill such as listening comprehension, reading comprehension, conversational Spanish, grammar, phrases, vocabulary, etc.
6. Others are designed to reinforce problematic areas such as spelling or pronunciation. As we have seen, there is great variety. We invite you to look up the publishers’ online catalogs and find the textbook that best suits your needs. To conclude, among the textbooks published in Castilla y León we highly recommend the title "Así es el español básico", a Spanish book for beginners edited by the Universidad de Salamanca.

You will find more interesting information and materials as well as language resources on our page Spanish teachers. In our section Learn Spanish you might find additional material for teaching and/or studying. The section Spanish Multimedia provides further methods and resources to learn Spanish. Additionally, you can check Spanish Online where you can find paid and free online courses.