This current study suggests that future secondary Spanish language teachers must be more like athletic coaches to ensure student success and score a so-called win in the classroom. Teachers must retool and redesign outdated and ineffectual curricula and instructional strategies to improve student performance. Focusing on language proficiency,…

This essay offers a candid overview of the past one hundred years of preK-fifth grade Spanish language teaching and learning in the United States. Among the topics addressed are numbers of programs, program models, and factors that impact the success of learners and programs.

The current study examines English-speaking learners of Spanish and their pragmatic development of request forms during a six-week immersion program in Madrid, Spain. Elicited production and intuition data were analyzed, focusing on personal deictic orientation, directness evidenced by clause type, and the use of "por favor"…

Language immersion students' lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic competencies are well documented, yet their phonological skill has remained relatively unexplored. This study investigates the Spanish vowel productions of a cross-sectional sample of 35 one-way Spanish immersion students. Learner productions were analyzed acoustically and compared to…

We report on the service-learning component of a Spanish-language Saturday school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for elementary-aged Spanish-language heritage learners and also examine the newly forming Latino community served by this innovative program. The US Spanish-speaking population is growing throughout the country, resulting in greatly increased…

Attempts to stimulate research and discussion of the social and affective variables that may impact language development in the adult second language immersion experience, because they may be noticeably different from the social factors at play in primary and secondary school-age learners' experiences. (Author/VWL)

Presents a total Spanish immersion program designed to improve students' spoken Spanish and deepen their cultural awareness under the auspices of a natural and informal environment. Students and their teachers meet in the forest at the end of the week from 40 to 50 hours and converse solely in Spanish. (Author/CK)

Provides an abbreviated update of a Spanish language program, initiated in Kansas City, Missouri in 1987-88, that was begun in response to a 1986 federal court order mandating the creation of magnet schools for ending segregative practices and beginning elementary school language immersion programs for French, German, and Spanish. (GLR)

Describes an immersion program for native Spanish-speaking university students from the University of California, Los Angeles, that was created to help them fulfill the language requirement. Reasons for the program, student characteristics, language characteristics, expected goals and outcomes of the program, and program observations are provided.…

Describes an adaptation of an intensive language (Spanish) program to suit the needs of two-year community college, resulting in student enthusiasm, increased enrollment, and more comprehensive coverage of material. (CB)

Examines the extent to which a highly motivated older adult can acquire a new language by focusing on a case study of a 57-year-old woman's endeavor to learn Spanish in an immersion setting. The learner's experiences, as recorded in diary entries, are examined in relation to the literature on cognitive aging. (Author/VWL)

A Spanish immersion program involving 11 first graders and 16 second graders is described; and the testing, progress, parent attitudes, and changes made in the program's first two years are discussed. Students' grade-equivalent scores in reading, mathematics, and language are compared with those of one other school and the district. (MSE)