Dicho y Hecho: Beginning Spanish

by Laila M. Dawson, Kim Potowski, Silvia Sobral

Building on Dicho y hecho's strong 25-year tradition, this eighth edition now incorporates an unwavering focus on authentic communication. It offers the most thorough and varied practice of vocabulary of any text available today. Thematic vocabulary is presented visually and contextually and then activated through multiple, progressive phases of application that range from identification in the chapter opening art scenes to personal expression and situational conversations.

Genres: Textbooks, Nonfiction

608 pages, Hardcover

First published July 3, 1989

Reviews

[Zacchaeus Nifong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another public school educational monstrosity. I suppose it's good.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

After twenty-some years as a teacher of English to foreign students, it was interesting to be on the receiving end, so to speak, when I enrolled in a Spanish class last year. Earlier experiences studying Latin, Russian, Italian, German, and French (albeit years ago) had me expecting grammar-heavy texts, so I was pleasantly surprised by the approach here, much more attuned to my preferred learning style (oral rather than written). Plenty of exercises, both in the texts and online, did a good job of reinforcing target structures and key vocabulary.

ONE weak spot, however, is the CD that accompanies the text -- it's not easy to use, and my instructor all but gave up trying to use it in class as an alternate speaking model because of the clumsy way the passages are labeled, not to mention that the passages are sometimes brief and elliptical -- it seemed barely worth the effort of queuing up the relevant passages. A similar issue is that while the target material is presented in neat chunks, at times it can be hard to locate in the book. I found myself using little stick-on book marks to reference key sections I needed frequently. It seemed that in the effort to make as many different types of material (presented in as many ways as possible), the textbook designers lost sight of one very important fact: students need to be able to use the book easily.

This issue of ease of use also applies to the "bundled" text that comes binder ready. Putting this hefty text into a fairly flimsy binder was a truly awful idea. Students' binders were constantly slipping off desks, springing open and spilling pages, and generally hard to handle. I ended up buying a sturdier binder, reinforcing torn pages with adhesive "O" rings, and (as mentioned above) making my own reference tabs for crucial sections.

Last but not least, why are there eight editions of this book already? It seems to me that this is yet another example of books being "updated" to force students to buy the most recent edition rather than a used text.

All these criticisms taken into account, I did find Dicho y hecho an effective textbook. If, as I suspect, the publishers issue a ninth edition soon, I hope that it will be a little less chaotic to use.

[Royce · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is [was?] a good textbook series. I prefer it to Glencoe's Buen Viaje, which is what I teach from now.

[Anthony Heard · Rating 5 out of 5]

gr8 handbook, i thought this was a really informative book, all you really need afterwards and maybe while using this is a nice spanish dictionary so you can practice a variety of words...increase your vocabulary per se