Written by a team of experienced teachers of Spanish, this textbook is designed to lead the adult beginner to a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish, giving balanced attention to the four key language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). It puts language learning into its real-life context, by incorporating authentic materials such as newspaper articles, poems and songs. It contains a learner and a teacher guide and is intended to complement study both inside and outside the classroom, by providing pair and group activities, as well as materials for independent learning. It also includes helpful reference features, such as a guide to grammatical terms, verb tables, vocabulary lists and a pronunciation guide. This extensively updated second edition features extra exercises to support the acquisition of good pronunciation, and is accompanied by a web companion that hosts expansion exercises, activities, solutions and useful links for each unit, as well transcripts, and access to brand new recordings of all the audio examples found in the book.

Written by a team of experienced teachers of Spanish, this textbook is designed to lead the adult beginner to a comprehensive knowledge of Spanish, giving balanced attention to the four key language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). It puts language learning into its real-life context, by incorporating authentic materials such as newspaper articles, poems and songs. It contains a learner and a teacher guide and is intended to complement study both inside and outside the classroom, by providing pair and group activities, as well as materials for independent learning. It also includes helpful reference features, such as a guide to grammatical terms, verb tables, vocabulary lists and a pronunciation guide. This extensively updated second edition features extra exercises to support the acquisition of good pronunciation, and is accompanied by a web companion that hosts expansion exercises, activities, solutions and useful links for each unit, as well transcripts, and access to brand new recordings of all the audio examples found in the book.

Cronica del alba is a novel by Sender with a Civil War background, like the popular Requiem por un campesino espanol, also in this series. The author evokes his childhood in rural Aragon at the beginning of the twentieth century in a book which has a charm and something of the character of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The young Pepe fights to believe in himself as a hero in the face of a world, and a father bent on putting him down. He is supported by his girlfriend, Valentina, who believes in him implicitly and often ends up in as much trouble as him. But there is something more here than scrapes and mischief-making. It is written by an older and disillusioned Pepe who has known real heroism and is now detained in a prison camp for Spanish Civil War refugees in southern France. The novel raises challenging questions about the loss of hope, how people cope with disillusionment, and the place of writing in that process. Moreover, since the novel reflects Sender's own childhood it sheds light on the complex relationship of fact and fiction in autobiographical novels.