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…

Dual enrollment is now a nation-wide phenomenon as all 50 states currently offer some form of dual-enrollment program to secondary-school students (Karp, Bailey, Hughes, and Fermin 2005). However, dual enrollment itself is often difficult to define as programs vary from school to school (Jordan, Cavalluzzo, and Corallo 2006). Therefore, language…

This article argues that Eduardo Lopez Bago's "La prostituta" evidences a deprivileging of a "visual" approach to narration and of the sensorial predominance of sight. Rather, Lopez Bago harnesses odors and deploys them as an important structuring device and a central generator of meaning, permitting his novel to be judged on its ability to evoke…

This paper explores the use of Judeo-Spanish in the Rosa Nissan's novels "Novia que te vea" (1992) and "Hisho que te nazca" (1996) and reveals the ways in which the presence of this language interrupts the otherwise linear coming-of-age narrative. An analysis of the main character's relationship with Judeo-Spanish establishes a critical dialogue…

The historical content of "La voz dormida" by Dulce Chacon gives us unique insight into the formation of male subjectivities during the ideological and physical struggle that followed the establishment of Franco's regime. The second part of the novel which centers around the figure of the "maquis," allows us to investigate the construction of a…

This article addresses the relationship between instructors' and students' perceptions and beliefs about first language (Ll) and target language (TL) use in the Spanish foreign language classroom and actual classroom use. Given the lack of research correlating perceptions and beliefs of both students and their teachers to their classroom language…

The increased dependence on student evaluations to assess instructional effectiveness at the post-secondary level manifests the growing importance the field places on students' perspectives of teaching and learning (Seldin 1993). Horwitz (1990), Kern (1995), and Schulz (1996) claim that mismatches between FL students' and teachers' expectations of…

The most cursory examination of literary depictions of the physically blind reveals a myriad of colorful, diverse and often odd characterizations. Portrayals of the sightless typically present them in roles overwhelmingly unflattering and flawed. In Federico Gamboa's "Santa," the blind piano player and coprotagonist, Hipolito, is cast as pathetic…

"Amor de Don Perlimplin con Belisa en su jardin" is one of Federico Garcia Lorca's shortest plays as well as one of his deepest. Its theme is love, particularly the interaction between spiritual longing and carnal desire, body and soul, humanity and divinity. These are aspects found in Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology which the…

Garro's one-act play offers an unusual combination of corpses and animate actors on stage thus combining life and death in the same body. Garro's piece presents students with an approach to "embodying" Mexican culture and its notions of death. The fusion of death and cultural practices in Mexico is a crucial part of the ongoing project for…

Secondary teachers often find it difficult to include the study of culture in their classes. Long-term cultural portfolios (LCPs) provide a method of allowing teachers to address culture in a substantial manner by allowing teachers to join students in the exploration of cultural topics. Teachers first select a cultural artifact, determine the…

Recent research has consistently shown that teacher working conditions are highly predictive of faculty turnover and student performance. However, very little work investigates specifically the experiences of foreign-language instructors. This paper reports results from a pilot survey of language teachers in public and private schools from across…

This article reports on an investigation of high-school students' motivations to study Spanish. An online Likert-scale questionnaire was administered to 631 students and 19 teachers. The most influential factors were determined and a principal axis factor analysis with Promax rotation was performed on the responses. The data indicated that the…

The present study investigates the processing of Spanish gender agreement during an online comprehension task. The linguistic variables examined are the noun class (semantic or non-semantic) and gender (masculine or feminine) of the head and attractor nouns, head noun morphology (overt or non-overt), and noun class and gender congruencies (matched…

This article reports on a quantitative analysis of /s/ in words of different lexical frequencies in a cohesive speech community. Speakers from Barranquilla, Colombia between 20-26 years of age read approximately 100 sentences, containing words with s + consonant sequences. These productions were submitted to auditory acoustical analysis; visual…