With units built around rich cultural topics and compelling essential questions, EntreCulturas and EntreCultures are the perfect fit for our IB Middle Years Programme. We love the focus on development of both language and cultural proficiency and the wide range of communicative learning activities that work as well in middle school as they do for high school learners.

"I teach Spanish 1 and 2 using EntreCulturas and this is my third year using the program. All of the resources are very intuitive. It's easy for me to navigate the Learning Site and find resources that learners need for each lesson. It's easy for me to find the formative assessments, to assign them, and to adjust the attempts they get to receive a passing grade.

The learners like it a lot because it's very fresh. For example in the food unit, there is discussion around food trucks and the kids love it and it's easy for them to relate. Something that hit me and that I love about the family unit is how there are nontraditional families represented. It's easy for my kids to look at the images and see people who look like them. " (Interview with Stephanie Shepherd, ACTFL 2019)

This is my 49th year in education. EntreCulturas provides multiple spontaneous conversation opportunities for students, and teachers are able to look at something and immediately go from there with it - and perhaps even do the types of things they used to have to do on their own. EntreCulturas is the only series that I know of that provides that kind of material for kids to begin to speak with each other naturally. It's set up the way that I've always been striving to teach.

I've been using levels one and two with my first and second year learners for a year and a half. I like it because it's very clear and is effective as an entry-level proficiency tool. The learners like it because they aren't as scared as they are of other textbooks. The material is made to be accessible to THEM. The lay out is easy to follow and even the font is approachable, which for entry level learning is very helpful. For some of my learners, they have difficultly even leaving their own neighborhood. I appreciate the content and resources that show younger students "a true and honest source" that they can connect to, that looks like something in the real world that they might see in a store or on TV or on the internet at home. When there is integrity to the learning through authenticity, it motivates the kids to stay in the target language.