About Us
WHO ARE WE?
We’re active classroom teachers who believe that offering students a clear understanding of grammar fundamentals provides the fastest path to academic success and true language fluency. “Grammar is the bone structure of language. Without it, you’re relegated to expressing yourself with gestures and infinitives.”
WHY DID WE WRITE BREAKING THE BARRIER?
We were tired of teaching from texts that:
- tried to be all things to all people
- overwhelmed us with too much material
- didn’t give students what we thought they truly needed
WHAT DID WE DO?
We clarified our thoughts on teaching and learning, and then created a language series to support our best teaching practices.
WHEN DID WE BEGIN?
Our very first chapters were written during the summer of 1996. Since then we’ve completed six titles – three in Spanish and three in French. We continue to develop new materials. You may also want to take a look at Remembering When, an article Cindy Beams wrote about our early days.
HOW DID WE DO IT?
We outlined our goals, began writing, and found that our students ate it up. Their enthusiasm inspired us to keep at it. Here’s a list of our primary objectives:
- provide all the necessary tools to speak, write, and understand Spanish and French with precision and confidence
- blend the rigor of serious content with simplicity, clarity, and a student-friendly voice
- engage students - teenagers through adults - with continually-updated topical content that’s culturally relevant and just plain fun
- enable students to achieve top scores on on AP, SAT II, IB, college and professional placement exams
- create materials - all under one cover - that are appropriately paced, which can be covered in a year, semester, or term
- free up teachers and students to use supplementary materials of their own choosing by ensuring that essential grammar is covered in a rock-solid way
- equip our students for a lifetime of pleasurable and authentic contacts with the Hispanic and Francophone worlds
HAVE WE FINISHED?
Although we have completed our six core titles, we:
- continue to learn from the suggestions of our users and fine-tune every new edition we publish
- have recently added more practice - speaking, listening and writing - on-line
- continue to add to our Audio-CD series, have developed an on-line newsletter, and are expanding our product line for independent learners
- are committed to including up-to-date national facts and fresh cultural anecdotes in each new edition
- have created our “Self-Learner Special” to address the particular needs of independent learners, whether they be homeschoolers or adult students
- are excited about our partnership with Think Spanish Magazine, which features a monthly column by John Conner entitled Hablando de Gramática and with Think French Magazine
- wouldn’t be happy unless we had a series of potential projects and partnerships in the pipeline
- publish a free quarterly newsletter called Breaking News with teaching ideas and news from around the world. Sign up now!
