An accurate portrayal of contemporary Spanish in Costa Rica necessitates the inclusion of a discussion of forms of address. Costa Rica is commonly listed among the countries that include "voseo" as part of its pronominal paradigm. The present descriptive study elucidates the sociolinguistic reality of "voseo" in Costa Rica and…

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…

This paper presents a case study that examined the principles and practices of one novice English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher at a prominent English language institution in Central America. More specifically, this qualitative study sought to contribute to the discussion of the perceived interdependent influences of EFL teachers' thoughts…

Teachers who participate in learning and teaching abroad enhance their intercultural competence, develop more globally informed and critical perspectives on education, and improve their foreign language and teaching skills. However, most of the research on teacher study abroad has been conducted with pre-service rather than in-service teachers. To…

This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

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 presents the analysis of a translanguaging by design activity I conducted with students finishing an EFL program at a Costa Rican university, for which I showed them pictures of graffiti in Spanish and encouraged them to discuss these, using their entire linguistic repertoire. I recorded their discussions, selected instances of…

Although millions of speakers of Spanish employ "voseo", the twentieth century did not see a single article published in "Hispania" that suggested incorporating instruction on "voseo" into the language classroom. In contrast, the twenty-first century has already seen three articles published in "Hispania"…

This study presents data gathered from a service-learning trip to Costa Rica designed for teacher candidates. Data include participant responses to writing prompts, field notes, and follow-up questionnaires. Results show that participants' experience with the language barrier raised their empathy toward English learners. However, participants…

I emigrated from Peru to the United States in the mid-1980s. More than 20 years later, a short trip to Latin America helped me come full circle personally and professionally and close the gaps that I had felt developing over the past two decades. This opportunity was provided by a Fulbright Senior Specialist Program award at the University of…

This study compared children's Spanish reading performance across 2 reading intervention conditions: small group versus individual (teacher-student). Six second-grade Costa Rican students with low Spanish reading ability participated in the study. An alternating-treatments design was used to compare the relative effectiveness of the 2…

Study abroad (SA) is one of the flagship offerings among United States higher education institutions. Approximately 220,000 students studied abroad in the 2005/2006 academic year, 52.8% of whom studied on programs that lasted eight weeks or less. The effect of these short-term programs on second language development has been little investigated,…

This article presents an autoethnographical account of my foray into Spanish immersion education in Costa Rica as a professor of multilingual education at a university in Canada. This language-learning journey was inspired by curiosity about the growing trend for Internet marketing of second-language learning as a form of tourism, which I label…