Book Title: Multigrade Spanish and Caribbean Music

Book Description

This course is designed to teach Spanish through Caribbean culture and music in a multigrade course. It is organized around the music curriculum: cumbia, bullerengue, mapalé, reggaetón, bachata, merengue, guajira, and salsa. You can also follow only the language sections if you need a textbook of Spanish solely. Sample conversations are useful chunks of information to apply in a real-life context or in classroom highly structured activities. They work well for circle-in circle-out, Konga lines, or speed-date like conversations where multiple levels are involved.

To make it a multigrade textbook of Spanish, this uses what Jerome Bruner calls a “spiral curriculum”. The language topics are repeated across the curriculum with some outward expansion. It’s mainly for Beginners, which include: Beginners 1 (know absolutely nothing), Beginners 2 (know something but can’t understand or speak). It’s also useful for speakers in the advanced spectrum: Intermediate, Advanced and Native speakers of Spanish (IAN).

This course uses translanguaging to reach all kinds of audiences. The author has been testing this kind of material in my own classroom of Borders and Languages 101: Music and Borderlands, Beginning Spanish 1 since 2019, in Fort Lewis College. This is curriculum that works.