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Spanish for Oral & Written Review
Mario Iglesias and Walter Meiden
A durable college-level review grammar for students who already have the basics of Spanish and want to consolidate them. Iglesias and Meiden move systematically through the trouble spots — the subjunctive, ser versus estar, por versus para, the thicket of past tenses — pairing crisp explanations with oral drills and written exercises meant for classroom use. First issued in the early 1960s and reprinted through many editions, it became a fixture of intermediate and advanced courses in North American universities. It is a workbook rather than a reader: unglamorous, thorough, and built for practice rather than pleasure. Anyone rebuilding rusty Spanish, or drilling toward fluency, will recognize its no-nonsense value.
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The authors
Mario Iglesias and Walter Meiden were longtime university Spanish instructors — Meiden taught for decades at Ohio State — who specialized in the grammar-and-composition end of language teaching. Their names are attached to several classroom texts of the same practical, drill-driven cast.
The book
Spanish for Oral and Written Review is exactly what the title promises: a structured pass through Spanish grammar for the intermediate-to-advanced learner, alternating explanation with speaking and writing exercises. First published around 1961 and revised across five editions into the 1990s, it circulated widely in college programs.
How it reads
Methodical and a little austere. Its explanations remain clear and reliable, though its exercises predate the communicative, immersion-first approaches that now dominate language pedagogy. As a reference for nailing down the subjunctive or the preterite/imperfect divide, it still holds up.
For more context
Pair it with a conversational or immersion method for balance, and with a good bilingual dictionary for the vocabulary the drills assume.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Mario Iglesias and Walter Meiden
- Publisher
- Holt, Rinehart and Winston
- Place of publication
- New York
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Reference
- Location
- Colorado