Higher education Spanish programs in the United States are diverse and complex, especially when it comes to student linguistic background. However, most studies on language proficiency were designed for traditional learners (L2s). In this study, we examine oral proficiency development of 125 Spanish majors in light of four linguistic profiles:…

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…

In this paper, we explore how advanced college students use the past history and experiences of others to understand the present while learning a foreign language through a content-integrated curriculum. To assess student learning we operationalize Norris (2006. "The Why (and How) of Assessing Student Learning Outcomes in College Foreign…

Research on the language-literature divide in undergraduate second language programs documents the challenge of engaging literature learners in classroom discourse which is conducive to their developing interpersonal speaking skills as measured on the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Scale. In this study, Integrated Performance Assessments (IPAs) were…

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…

Answering calls to map college-level proficiency development (Modern Language Association, 2007) and longitudinally chart language learning (Barkaoui, 2014; Ortega & Byrnes, 2008), we mapped the oral proficiency growth of 1,922 lower-division college students of Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish (in the second, third, or fourth semester of…

At a time when language programs around the United States are in crisis--the University of Rhode Island's Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures is realigning its curriculum to emphasize proficiency and intercultural competence within a strong liberal arts context. The result of the department's recent initiatives? More than…

This study represents program-level action research. A U.S. university Spanish language program had a goal for students to reach the ACTFL (2012) Intermediate Mid level after 2 years. An empirical question that resulted after regular end-of-year testing was whether the students were doing their best on assessments. To investigate this, 253…

This study attempts to ascertain if the WebCAPE placement exam can be used to measure improvement in an upper division grammar course. The WebCAPE online placement exam is a widely used instrument designed to help university language programs place students into the basic language course best corresponding to their proficiency level. This is done…

This pedagogical implementation study advocates for performance-driven assessments to help learners become aware of and improve upon presentational speaking skills at the advanced level. A social media content creation tool, Adobe Spark Video, enabled learners to practice oral skills outside of class. The task design, implementation, and…

Despite the foreign language community's historical interest in employing technology to support language learning, few research studies have linked its use to instructional outcomes and most have failed to address whether technology enhancements lead to increased proficiency gains. This article examines the relationship between technology use and…

During the last decade, researchers of foreign language pedagogy have become increasingly interested in the "language-literature divide" (Donato and Brooks 2004). The purpose of the current study is to contribute to this growing body of research by investigating the extent to which whole class discussions in three third-year…

The growing importance of Spanish in the U.S. has generated an impressive growth in the number of university Spanish programs that offer community service learning. However, students' and community partners' misaligned expectations can create tensions and problems in these programs. Instructors must make a special effort to articulate and align…

Content-Based Instruction (CBI) may result in improved proficiency in language skills due to the meaningful combination of subject matter and foreign language as a means of communication. This paper shows how university students improved their level of English by means of a content methodology as they attended a course called Topics in Molecular…

Articulation is one of the principal challenges of all foreign language programs. A key component of the articulation process is an assessment of student language abilities. On college and university campuses this process is usually conducted via a placement test. As developments in proficiency research have progressed, it is clear that programs…