Spanish-Language Newspapers in the Classroom

Abstract

Finding the most appropriate Spanish text for the advanced intermediate level (fourth-year high school or fourth-semester college) has always been difficult. The students have had enough grammar and they know how to read with a dictionary, but they still lack oral proficiency and are not ready for unedited literary readings. Moreover, many at this level are in the last of a sequence of courses, and may never take a formal Spanish class again. It is therefore crucial to present them with material in good, contemporary Spanish that is vocabulary-building, topical, interesting, and culturally informative. The only thing that I have found to meet all these requisites is the daily newspaper. I discovered this almost by accident when I handed out to my students in a fourth-semester class a few copies of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish section of the Miami Herald that comes free by request with the English edition. I wanted the students to observe the kind of news that El Nuevo Herald carries, but to my surprise they had little trouble, beyond vocabulary, in reading the articles assigned; and, most surprising of all, they continued to read unassigned sections of the newspaper on their own outside of class. Some even took their copy home to show their parents that they were indeed using their acquisition of Spanish in an accountable