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  • Reading (Literature) In, Across, and Beyond the Undergraduate Spanish Curriculum
  • Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol
Keywords

extensive reading, literature, reading, transcultural competence, translingual competence, undergraduate Spanish curriculum

Over the years, several colleagues and I have wrestled with what it means to teach Spanish in a liberal arts college. To begin with, what does it mean to "know" a foreign language? Our Spanish majors, typically motivated by their vocational goals (intense desires to become bilingual physicians/lawyers/social workers/pastors/etc.), answer immediately: "to speak it fluently." How do we as faculty respond to the same question? Our answers, in contrast, focus on the integration of helping students develop functional proficiency in all four language skills; immersing them in the linguistic, cultural, and literary heritage and contemporary realities of the Spanish-speaking world; and assisting them to become knowledgeable global citizens and lifelong learners per our institutional mission. In this regard, prior to the publication of the 2007 MLA report "Foreign Language and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World" and the 2009 "Report to the Teagle Foundation on the Undergraduate Major in Language and Literature," two ideas have guided me as I have attempted to ground curricular design in this web of diverse elements, on one hand, and also communicate more explicitly to students how and why an undergraduate Spanish major encompasses more than just development of oral proficiency in face-to-face interactions in order to bridge the gap between what students say they want to learn in the Spanish classroom and what professors actually teach.

The first of these ideas is Patricia Chaput's statement that "there is no such thing as 'just language'" (33). She explains further, saying, "Language used by native speakers is inseparable from their cultural and historical experience, so that to understand language is to understand the significance of events and texts and of the associations with them that speakers retain today" (33). Even for those students who "just" want to talk to native speakers, conversation will be at best superficial if it grows only out of putting words together in sequences to satisfy immediate communicative needs without an appreciation of the vast cultural horizon out of which engaged communication emerges. Essential to entry into that cultural horizon is reading texts, both literary works and other types of written discourse important in the target culture.

Scholars and teachers articulate the value of reading texts, whether literary or nonliterary, from a variety of frames of reference.1 Those who approach the reading of texts from the angle of second language acquisition shed light on certain aspects. Janet Swaffar and Katherine Arens, for example, look at teaching students to read literature as intimately linked to the teaching of language, culture, and (textual) genres, both popular and "high culture" genres, and emphasize that the endeavor involves "teaching patterns of communication in their material and cultural contexts, as marks of membership in a culture" in a multiple literacies approach (147). Within this framework, then, reading literature is essential to students' development of a deep "cultural literacy" but intertwined with reading of other types of discourse (see chapter 6). From a broad humanistic perspective, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum writes of the value of reading [End Page 90] literature as crucial for students' becoming world citizens. More specifically, she posits the need for students to "cultivate [their] humanity" through a critical examination of themselves, a recognition of the ways in which they are inextricably bound to other human beings across the globe, and through the development of a "narrative imagination" (9–11), the latter defined as "the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person's story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have" (10–11). In this light, reading narrative fiction—especially novels, whose length permits extended development of characters and context—can promote students' viewing other worlds not only "sympathetically," crossing group boundaries in their imagination, but also "critically," with an eye toward understanding relationships between individuals and groups in the real world (101, 111). Guy Cook highlights the transformative power of...

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