Greater interest from students, universities, and communities has increased pressure on faculty to design and implement service-learning courses. Often with no prior experience and limited institutional and programmatic guidance, faculty must make their way through a growing body of literature on service-learning. This article presents a novice…

The session that the AATSP organized at this year's MLA Convention in Boston (held on January 4, 2013) was dedicated to a topic that has been the object of constant debate in the past decades: the use of "Spanglish" as a marker of identity among US Latinos. The author states that she puts "Spanglish" into quotation marks…

This study is part of a larger project to reassemble the historical presence of Spanish in what has always been complex multilingual ecologies of language use, policy, and ideology in California. In order to re-establish the place of Spanish, language educators and linguists need to rethink Spanish and Spanglish beyond English-centric memory.…

In this exploratory study of subtractive bilingualism in Spanish-English bilingual children, we present evidence that crosslinguistic influence has a selective effect on heritage first language loss. Differences in feature strength between English and Spanish in interrogative and negative polarity item (NPI) sentences seem to affect the…

Much of the limited scholarship dedicated to Sor Juana's "autos sacramentales" tends to separate them from the "loas" that were meant to introduce them. Critics often exalt the "loas" for the sympathy that they express for indigenous beliefs, while neglecting the "autos" or viewing them as masterful…

The present study utilizes readings taken from texts in social psychology to examine the effects by gender of embedded "what" questions and elaborative "why" questions on reading comprehension. During regular class time, 97 advanced second language (L2) learners of Spanish read two different vignettes, either with or without…

This essay explores the relationship(s) between English and Spanish in the novel "Raining Backwards" (1988) by Cuban American Roberto G. Fernandez. While the many linked plots and characters suggest many protagonists, this study demonstrates how language itself takes on the role of protagonist. Through the author's use of calques…

This study explores various linguistic strategies that characterize what is commonly referred to as "Spanglish"; namely, code-switching, code-mixing, borrowings and other language contact phenomena commonly employed by Chicana/o bilinguals. The analysis of linguistic features is based on creative pieces of writing produced by Chicana/o…

This article discusses what is at stake in teaching works written in "Spanglish" in Spanish departments and what teaching such works might mean for students and the scholarly community at large. This article primarily comes out of the author's experiences teaching "Spanglish" works in Spanish courses at a major research…

Dialectal differences are frequently cited by members of a majority group as their main means of identifying members of a minority ethnic group. However, existing stereotypes of minority language varieties and their speakers often suggest that social prejudices influence attitudes towards minority groups and their linguistic varieties. The present…

This study examines the effects of processing instruction (PI) alone versus PI and output (O) on the acquisition of three conjunctional and infinitival phrases in Spanish. Seventy intermediate and advanced-intermediate high school participants received: 1) PI on three consecutive days (PI + PI + PI); 2) PI for two days and meaning-based output…

Spanish filmmakers Alejandro Amenabar, Antonio Naharro, and Alvaro Pastor have recently focused on disability and personal identity by presenting the disabled subject in the foreground and by posing an array of ethical questions. This essay explores representations of disability as they appear in "Mar adentro" and "Yo, tambien"…

The present study examines the nature of the Spanish rhotics experimentally, investigating the possibilities that the trill is best understood as deriving from an underlying geminate or that the tap and trill may be separate phonemes. In order to explore these two theories, a behavioral task was designed exploiting the absence of native words in…

Studies have shown an absence of Afro-Latin American culture at all levels of Spanish instruction. In this essay, I propose the use of film to expand the undergraduate curriculum. Film provides both a visual and cultural narrative for the understanding of Latin American history, culture, and literature, and is an invaluable resource for teaching…

This essay reappropriates the segmentary form of the three works of Agustin Fernandez Mallo's "Nocilla" project ("Nocilla Dream" [2006]; "Nocilla Experience" [2008]; "Nocilla Lab" [2009]) en route to an urban reading of its fragmentary structure. The project's interdisciplinary push, overwhelming incorporation of both scientific and…