S5 Preface • vii “Our role as educators is to guide our students to become informed, inquisitive citizens who can question, reflect, and listen to others.” - Silvia Sobral What are your students' course goals as learners? How does Dicho y hecho support your students' intellectual and language growth? By the end of this introductory Spanish course, your students will: • Participate in everyday-life situations and effectively and appropriately carry out short, spontaneous conversations about familiar and contemporary topics. • Communicate for a range of purposes, such as describing, informing, requesting information, expressing personal opinions, giving instructions, and creative expression. • Identify main ideas and key information in non-specialized Spanish oral and written texts. • Present information to a general audience on a range of familiar topics related to daily life and their own experiences. • Explore, compare, and research cultural products and practices to better understand cultural perspectives of the Spanish-speaking communities around the world. Apply critical-thinking and problem-solving skills to research, analysis, exchange of information, and ideas, in order to understand and present their own ideas, solve problems, and carry out tasks and projects, both individually and collaboratively. Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice Themes As students gain confidence in their own language skills, Dicho y hecho aims at fostering contexts that are inclusive of diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Some of the selected readings, videos, and cultural topics will facilitate insightful discussions about important topics, such as how each person defines family, the question of access and affordability in cities and housing, cultural appropriation in the fashion industry, the environment, technology to foster inclusion, and race-based inequalities. Strategies To support your students' growth as independent language learners, Dicho y hecho continues to feature strategies in the skill development section, which is also titled Dicho y hecho. These strategies will help students with different stages of the learning and creative processes, such as interpreting, planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Estrategia digital notes in the Cultura section aim at supporting their digital literacy skills, and the new Estrategia de aprendizaje notes provide tips to help them become smarter and more effective Spanish learners. ACTFL World-Readiness Standards Dicho y hecho aligns with the main principles of the ACTFL 21st-Century Skills. Dicho y hecho reflects an increasing focus on developing students' communicative competence by putting more emphasis on what they, as learners, can do with the language while increasing their own agency in the process. The ACTFL World Readiness Goal Areas (five Cs—Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities) have informed every aspect of Dicho y hecho by providing the framework for the development of language skills in activities that focus on meaningful and achievable communication. Dicho y hecho maximizes students' opportunities to develop the three modes of communication— interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational—by ensuring that all activities require genuine communication and that there are more opportunities to interpret, discuss, and create than ever before.
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