Learners who lack the perception of specific sounds or pronunciation can attain a measure of inability to participate in meaningful communication due to their difficulties in understanding and being understood. This article presents lesson plans that provide a framework for addressing the needs of learners as they move from perceiving sounds to…

The paper discusses the interpretation of adversative clauses introduced by "pero" and concessive clauses introduced by "aunque" in Spanish. Specifically, the discussion centers around structures that exhibit the forms: (i) "A, pero B," (ii) "A, aunque B-INDICATIVE," and (iii) "A, aunque…

In an increasingly interconnected world that relies on social awareness and tolerance, developing students' cultural competence is now more vital than ever. Despite its importance, language educators may find the teaching of culture particularly challenging as it may seem to lack curricular structure and be difficult to evaluate. For these…

Digital narratives have been used to promote target language reading and writing as part of instructed second language teaching. These texts can help break the monotony of more traditional print material and get learners closer to the multimodal practices that are part of their everyday written interactions, including elements such as video,…

The objective of the current study is to investigate the development of awareness of dialectal differences in Spanish by second language learners in a formal language learning classroom setting in the United States. Sensitivity toward different regional varieties of a language forms part of socio-linguistic--and ultimately,…

A rise in antiracist reform sparked by summer 2020 events have prompted a reexamination of course material across all levels and subjects in schools. This article will focus primarily on Desirée Bela-Lobedde's "Ser mujer negra en España" (2018), and demonstrate how fragments from her culturally rich autobiography, with the support of…

Accompanying the recent rise in cautious popularity surrounding Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI), some language educators are exploring innovative linguistic interactions with Gen-AI. Seeking to add a literature approximation to such criticism, this article explores two activities that feature Gen-AI in undergraduate literature courses.…

This article presents a guide to implementing oral history projects in Spanish language courses, drawing from our fifteen-year collaborative initiatives with various community organizations in the Trenton area. Among these is our comprehensive Puerto Rican Oral History Project, which resulted in five short video documentaries and over sixty…

ChatGPT employs a deep learning (DL) model constructed using artificial neural networks and designed to analyze input data and extract increasingly complex features (Hu and Buehler 2023). Its chatbot interface makes it easy to use, requiring just a prompt to generate a response from the model. It is capable of producing fluent text in multiple…

While translation was once a key component of language teaching, throughout the twentieth century, it largely gave way to methods and approaches with a greater focus on communicative competence. However, efforts have been made in the past few decades to return translation and more generally multilingual language learning to classrooms. In the…

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

The United States is undergoing a political tug-of-war between globalism and nationalism with world language education caught in the middle of this sociopolitical debate. The current political trend towards nationalism and isolationism is rendering world language education vulnerable to further cuts. This article discusses why it is vital for the…

This article details the challenges and best practices of evaluating second language learners for placement into postsecondary Spanish language courses. The literature on testing for placement purposes in second language acquisition and language testing provides a great deal of insight, but language programs must make many decisions as well that…

This article explores perspectives from language pedagogy, writing and rhetoric, and media studies to analyze the implications and implementations of video essay assignments in intermediate and advanced Spanish language courses. The field of Hispanic Studies has largely accepted film as a useful pedagogical tool with broad student appeal. Yet…

Most digital humanities programs and centers, as well as the scholars that populate them, tend to be housed in or linked to English or History departments. As a result, graduate students outside of these disciplines with an interest in the digital humanities must work within existing institutional structures and constraints to acquire the…