The all-encompassing term "Medical Spanish" references the Spanish used by healthcare professionals. Medical Spanish courses have gained traction as the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. continues to grow. Consequently, demand for courses in Medical Spanish and other areas of Spanish for Specific Purposes (SSP), a subfield of…

Ahead of the recent wave of social justice movements (e.g., [All] Black Lives Matter (#BLM), #MeToo, #StopJewishHate, #StopAsianHate), in 2019 the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) declared a stance on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in language education. It affirmed that it "values diversity…

The scope of this article is twofold: to revisit the foundational importance of Business Spanish to the United States and to track its early formalization in American secondary and higher education. It will focus on the years surrounding American Independence in 1776, followed by the key role played by the American Association of Teachers of…

World language classrooms in the United States have been significantly impacted by the physical and ideological disruptions experienced in recent history. Such disruptive times call for the reform of pedagogical practices to raise awareness of social justice issues and ignite real change both in and out of language classrooms. This essay outlines…

The Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures (DFLL) at University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) is home to a pioneer program in Spanish for the Professions and Specific Purposes (SPSP) in US higher education. For the last two decades (2000-18), its Spanish curricula have been carefully experimenting and evolving to adjust to the societal…

This article analyzes the growing trend among US higher education institutions to replace four-semester, proficiency-oriented language requirement models with shorter exposure-oriented sequences frequently restricting exemptions and aimed at bringing languages into distribution requirement structures. By contrasting the history, strengths, and…

In scholarship on language pedagogy, there is growing momentum for teaching Afrodescendant literature in language classrooms. Various teachers and scholars of languages and literatures have responded to the need for greater racial inclusion in language curricula by exploring approaches to teaching Afro-Hispanic literary texts (Villegas Rogers…

Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has called for proposals on the "greening" of the Spanish curriculum for their 2020 convention. University students are and will be faced with complex twenty-first-century economic problems, such as food deserts, costs of industrial agriculture, organic regulations and market demand,…

Based on the experience of developing and teaching an introductory course on Spanish-English interpretation, this study will situate and justify translation, more specifically interpreting, as an important component for language development. The goal is to analyze ways the development and implementation of an interpreting course (focusing on…

The to-be-expected and lingering dialectics of the current curricular landscape confirm that the steady growth in Spanish for the Professions and Specific Purposes (SPSP), supported by a growing number of colleagues in US higher and secondary education has also been characterized by a stubborn resistance on the part of others, as SPSP moves in…

Building on its substantial and sustained evolution over the past thirty-plus years, Spanish for the Professions and Specific Purposes (SPSP) should flourish in the future as a paradigmatic curricular mainstay. A characteristic of its steadily emerging theory-based maturity within the Language for the Professions and Specific Purposes (LPSP)…

The US health care system faces linguistic challenges. Disparities in language-concordant care for Spanish speakers persist due to current demographics and a paucity of bilingual providers. A proliferation of courses in Spanish for health care professions suggests that universities and post-graduate institutions are attempting to meet this need;…

Two recent reports offer some paradigm-shifting proposals regarding the teaching of world languages in general at the undergraduate level. The Modern Language Association's (MLA's) "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" and "Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature"…

In the past two years, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has produced two significant proposals for curricular change in foreign languages. The first, "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changing World," addressed the foreign language curriculum with specific suggestions for programmatic transformation. The second,…

The Spanish program at UNC Charlotte is timely and responsive because it is designed to meet documented societal (job market) needs in today's and tomorrow's global village and economy by providing graduates with strong specialties in English-Spanish translating and in business Spanish. It is integrative in that it does so while maintaining its…