Praxis II: Spanish: Praxis Teacher's Certification Exam

Rating:
Summary: Lack of editing/other mistakes makes for a poor review text
Review: I will be taking the Praxis II Spanish Content Exam soon, and I have been searching for good prep materials, so I was happy when I found this book for sale on Amazon. Unfortunately, once it arrived, it was a great disappointment. The work is very poorly edited, with the most glaring example being a total disregard for the proper use of the written accent. Examples are easy to find throughout the book everywhere the authors include Spanish text selections (articulos and not artículos, numero and not número, huespedes and not huéspedes, and on and on), and even in the verb conjugation reference charts use of accents is erratic: Present subjunctive forms of estar -> estoy estes esté... / imperfect forms of vivir -> vivia, vivias, vivia, etc.

I haven't bothered to read all of the sections in the "Familiarity with Hispanic Culture" section, because the little bit I have read has factual errors. Spain is not divided into "15 regions," and even if it were, these "15 regions" are listed as "the north," "the central region," "the south" and "the east", due to a poorly constructed paragraph - that's still only four "regions". If you can ignore the faulty syntax, you could then learn the names of 14 of the "regions" of Spain, which is still not quite right, since Spain is divided into 50 provinces each of which is within one of 17 autonomous communities. The authors left out Asturias, las Islas Baleares and las Islas Canarias, and additionally collapsed two communities, Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, into a new one, Castilla.

Other errors can be found in the "Grammar and Maps" reference section. For example, it came as a great surprise to me that the 3rd pers. sing future of poder was podrpa and the past participles of escribir and poner are ecrito and puseto, respectively. Although these are most likely "just typos", there was apparently no attempt to edit this book at all.

I also found the few maps and images to ve of very poor quality, and in fact they seem to be nothing more than cheap clip art or copies of images from different web pages. I found the map of Spain that is used in this book on a mail-order bride website and the same fuzzy graphic of Spanish pesetas on a high school student's webpage; where these pictures originally appeared is anybody's guess, since there is no citation in the XAM book or on the other webpages.

Actually, it wasn't just the bad graphic of the Spanish pesetas that caught my attention. The image appears on a page entitled "Money from Spanish-speaking Countries". That poor-quality picture and a list of some out-of-date conversion equivalents in US dollars of the coins and bill shown are all that the XAM authors had to say about money in the Spanish-speaking world. No mention of any other currencies like the peso, quetzal, sol or bolivar, just to name a few. And in a book which has a 2004 copyright date, don't you think they might have mentioned the transition to the Euro in Spain?

The section I was most interested in was the practice test. Unfortunately, and especially after losing confidence in the prep book as a whole after looking through the review and reference pages, I found it to be a great disappointment. There were, of course, many more typos (which is quite ironic, since a great number of questions deal with the test taker's ability to determine whether or not an accent has been used incorrectly or perhaps left out) which left me thinking, perhaps the best preparation this book had to offer was all of the time I spent viewing it with a critical eye to find the mistakes. Too bad. I was really hoping to have found a nice preparation tool for my upcoming Praxis II Exam, but this is, without a doubt, the worst test preparation tool I have ever seen.