A Responsive, Integrative Spanish Curriculum at UNC Charlotte

Key documents in recent decades have been pointing the way toward a significant re-engineering of the national foreign language curriculum in the United States. Considered in concert, they suggest a renewed relevance and centrality—an evolving toponymic identity—for the study of foreign languages and cultures. This reconceptualization has been increasingly evidenced via the learner-centered forging of nontraditional, interdisciplinary partnerships in which content and methodology have been evolving distinctive architectures for what an undergraduate or graduate program in foreign languages, in this case, Spanish, might be today and in the future. In addition to language acquisition and the traditional study of literature, civilization and culture, and linguistics, how do we enhance our preparation of today's students of Spanish for fuller participation in the global village and economy into which they will graduate? How might they become better prepared to put their study of other languages and cultures to use, which increasingly factors in their real-world needs and inclinations, once they begin to seek gainful employment? Two recent reports and a recruitment brochure issued by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), the 2008–2009 edition of the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Outlook Handbook, and the 1988 U.S. congressional legislation for the creation of federally funded centers for international business education and research (CIBERs; see CIBERWEB) provide us with examples of a roadmap for responsive curricular development, the ongoing paradigm shift in language for specific purposes (LSP, which has always subsumed all forms of curricular design, including literary studies) that is more fully accountable to the needs of both the learner and society.

Such curricular development, of course, does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it responds to external pressures that influence change. For example, in his 1980 book, The Tongue-Tied American, Congressman Paul Simon had exhorted the institution of American higher education to engage in a broad self-analysis: "Each college should examine its own program to see if it is meeting today's and tomorrow's needs, or if it is still focused on yesterday's needs" (180) because "[u]nless complemented by academic training in the history, culture, economics and politics of a given society, the knowledge of its language alone becomes a dull instrument" (59). In 1990, Dereck Bok, former president of Harvard University, wrote in Universities and the Future of America that "[s]o long as universities depend on society for their existence and so long as society requires the education and experience that these institutions can uniquely supply, the academy has no choice but to do its part to meet the nation's legitimate needs" (104), a prescription echoed by another educational leader, J. Wade Gilley (former president of the University of Tennessee), in Thinking about American Higher Education: The 1990s and Beyond: "College and university leaders must work to include societal needs on the agenda as they go about developing their institutions" (106). And in 1994, Judith Melton (then head of foreign languages at Clemson University) issued a challenge to foreign language educators in the ADFL Bulletin (MLA Association of Departments of Foreign Languages): "While we certainly want to and should preserve the engaging and challenging study of literature, we also need to expand our offerings and redefine what a language degree, undergraduate and graduate, means in the changing environment of the twenty-first century" (23).

In its 2007 report titled "Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World," the MLA finds that "the two-tiered configuration [language versus literature] has outlived its usefulness and needs to evolve. The critical moment in which language departments find themselves is therefore also an opportunity." The report says that "the language major should be structured to produce a specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence" (emphasis added), which "places value on the ability to operate between languages." Such a transformation, which will serve to "counter the isolation and marginalization that language and literature departments often experience on American campuses," should be premised on an understanding of "cultural...