Nicolás Guillén's "El gran zoo" (1967), illustrated by Fayad Jamís, was the first Hispanic bestiary to prominently feature humans in a space traditionally inhabited by beasts. Guillén's verses transform the bestiary from a didactic tool used for centuries to instruct and uniform society into a subversive text that openly denounces the…

As inclusion becomes a growing standard for universities in the United States, data extracted from OCLC suggest that university libraries in the United States build their Spanish-language collections with books purchased primarily in Spain and Mexico. This overlooks presses from 19 other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. This research is…

Study abroad (SA) provides a space and place for second language (L2) learners to be challenged in terms of their target language skills and intercultural awareness. In order to appropriately equip learners, a task-based approach seems ideal to identify learners' specific needs (Long 2015). The present study reports a multiphase needs analysis…

The purpose of this paper is to comprehend the importance that grammar has in the teaching of writing in the Hispanic American countries and Spain. To achieve this, the discussion that has taken place in these countries about the importance of sentence grammar in the teaching of writing is analysed. Three proposals for the contextualised teaching…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

Traditionally in the United States, study abroad has been regarded as the primary source for meaningful interaction with members of the target language (TL) community, particularly at the postsecondary level. Today, more than 300,000 college students study abroad every year, and most of them do so in short-term island programs (defined as programs…

This experimental study tests the Interface Hypothesis by looking into processes at the syntax-discourse interface, teasing apart acquisition of syntactic, semantic and discourse knowledge. Adopting Lopez's (2009) pragmatic features [[plus or minus]a(naphor)] and [[plus or minus]c(ontrast)], which in combination account for the constructions of…

This study aimed to analyze the student's behaviour in relation to their degree of commitment, participation, and contribution in a MOOC based on a social learning approach. Interaction data was collected on the learning platform and in social networks, both of which were used in the third edition of a social MOOC course. This data was then…

This study investigates how heterosexuality is performed and achieved in everyday language use, specifically in personal ads from the Internet. Within personal ads, it focuses on the metaphors used by ad posters to articulate concepts of love, desire, gender and sexuality. The aim was to determine how the use of certain metaphors reflects ad…

This article describes the first part of a study that explores the metaphorical language used by 64 second language (L2) Spanish and English as a foreign language (EFL) pre- and inservice teaching assistants and instructors in their conceptualization of L2 teachers and students. The article investigates the philosophical perspective embedded in…

A significant number of Hispanic children's books and juvenile short stories and novels produced in the last two decades reveal the social and cultural elements that affect the lives, traditions, and beliefs of young adults from Spanish-speaking countries. These books contain sociocultural realism, yet with a touch of the innocence and freshness…