To chart the growth of Spanish language education in the United States, primarily in the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, we analyzed several relevant data sets. These data come from various sources and helped inform our analyses of the current status of postsecondary Spanish language education and curricular and programmatic implications for the future.
The Modern Language Association (MLA) was founded in 1883 and is the largest professional organization of postsecondary modern language educators at the national and international levels. As part of its mission, the MLA collects and publishes on its website (www.mla.org) information pertaining to foreign language education at the tertiary level, from enrollment totals to curricular and programmatic trends in language departments, among many other reports. One of the most cited reports is the Language Enrollment Database, which includes the results of a nationwide survey that has been sent to institutions of higher education every few years since 1958. In addition to the data that constitute the enrollment database, more recently the MLA has collected data on the number of enrollments that correspond to upper- and lower-level courses, as well as the number of American university students who have declared language or literature as primary and secondary majors.
The Advanced Placement (AP) data that are referred to throughout this book come from two distinct data sets licensed to the authors by the College Board covering the period from 1979 to 2014. The first data set details the number of modern foreign language exams given from 1994 to 2014 in each state, and allows for the totals to be filtered by state, year, foreign language exam, score, gender, dominant (“best”) language, and ethnic and racial background. Two extra variables were derived by the College Board at the request of the authors and were added to the data set: heritage speaker status; and an additional Hispanic category that conflated Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and other Hispanic students. For a student to be identified as a heritage speaker in the database, he or she had to have lived or studied for a month or more in a country where the language is spoken and have used the language regularly at home. The second data set made available to the authors provided summary statistics for all AP exams taken between 1979 and 1993. The summary tables included tallies for all AP exams nationwide from each racial and ethnic group and reported their scores on a scale from 1 to 5.
Undergraduate Spanish courses and program configurations from seven prominent private and public American universities that had digitally archived university course catalogs and university bulletins were studied longitudinally from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries (private: Brigham Young University and Stanford University; public: University of Arizona; University of Kentucky; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Minnesota; and University of Wisconsin–Madison). Two additional public universities were included in the initial analysis, though it was discovered after the coding had begun that records were not available back to the early twentieth century. The course descriptions but not degree requirements for The Ohio State University were available from 1963 to the present, while the University of Iowa had course descriptions and degree requirements accessible from 1970 to the present. This survey of course catalogs was not meant to be exhaustive or to sample from all institution types or regions, but was used to provide a rough gauge of how Spanish language education evolved during the twentieth century. We are cognizant of the fact that course naming conventions, curricular structures, and programmatic configurations change over time and that the course titles and descriptions printed in the course catalogs may not exactly reflect the content that was taught or whether the course was actually taught in that particular year. Moreover, the courses were placed in only one category (e.g., elementary language, literature, culture, and linguistics), though their content may have overlapped with other categories. Notwithstanding these limitations, we feel that our analysis of these course catalogs and the classification system adopted provide a useful tool for determining what university Spanish language curricula might have looked like at each time interval.
Once the nine universities were selected and contemporary curricula were preliminarily reviewed, the researchers created categories in which to place each course from an institution’s Spanish curriculum. Those categories included Spanish for the professions, translation/interpretation, elementary language, advanced language, culture, linguistics, literature, teaching, service learning, heritage/native language, and independent/directed studies. In addition to the coding of courses at each time interval, the presence of a major, minor, and tracks within the major or minor were noted, as were the number of credit-hours or courses needed for completion of each program of study. The programmatic configurations and academic terminology from the early twentieth century were difficult to compare with the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but were included nonetheless. The coding of the number and type of Spanish courses and major/minor options available began with the earliest bulletin year accessible for each university, in some cases as early as the mid-1800s, and then was continued every ten years, from 1900 until 2000. From 2000 to 2015, the courses and programs were coded every five years to achieve greater granularity in the analysis. Our focus is primarily on the second half of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, given the greater similarity in overall curricular structures and publishing conventions of university bulletins.
The authors created an online survey with Likert-scale items to elicit in a very broad manner current Spanish language educators’ “perceptions of the most pressing programmatic and curricular issues in Spanish education at your institution overall.” The survey was distributed electronically via electronic listservs, professional discussion boards and email distribution lists, and personal contacts to reach Spanish educators of all ranks, from full professors at research institutions to adjunct, contract faculty at two-year community colleges to inexperienced first-year graduate students teaching beginning courses. When the survey was closed and the results were analyzed, approximately seven hundred educators had completed some or all of the survey. The survey aimed at capturing Spanish language educators’ concerns at a general level regarding specific curricular and programmatic issues at their institutions, and it did not provide any information on why the respondents chose the responses they did. For example, the individual instructor may not have any problem in his or her own class with a particular issue but may feel that others in the program do and thus consider the issue a concern.
The survey included several demographic and institutional questions before requesting respondents’ reactions to fifty-five statements associated with the following areas of concern in contemporary Spanish language education: service learning, heritage/native language learners, Spanish for specific purposes, assessment, sociocultural realities, teacher/instructor training, online/hybrid instruction, national standards, and other issues. Each section contained between four and eight Likert-scale questions, with an “other” option for respondents to include other areas of concern. The 5-point Likert scale ranged from “very much a concern” to “not a concern at all,” with an additional sixth option, “not applicable to my program.” Given our concern that some foreign language educators may not recognize the terminology and concepts that appeared in the national standards section, the sixth response option available was “unfamiliar with concept(s).”
The preservice training of foreign language instructors as part of their university studies to fill positions at public and private institutions, primarily at the secondary level, has received particular attention among scholars in applied linguistics. One of the most pressing concerns for many teacher trainers is the level of candidates’ foreign language proficiency. In 2010 the Educational Testing Service (ETS) began offering world language exams in the most commonly taught languages, and many states have begun requiring it of preservice teachers seeking state certification. As such, the authors were licensed ETS Praxis data from 2010 to 2015 that included candidates’ de-identified scores on their first attempt at the Spanish, French, and German world language exams, as well as their scores from their first attempt at any other of the Praxis series exams, including Principles of Learning and Teaching: Early Childhood / Grades 7–12, and World Languages Pedagogy. These data will allow for direct comparisons between candidates’ language and pedagogical knowledge and abilities.
Nearly without exception, postsecondary world language programs have placement procedures that attempt to match incoming students’ levels of linguistic competency with the program’s course levels. In many cases, these procedures consist of an exam whose score determines the placement of the student in the program. For many years, one of the most widely used exams has been the WebCAPE (Web-Based Computer Adaptive Placement Exam), designed at Brigham Young University and currently licensed to and distributed by Perpetual Works, Inc. This exam tests students’ grammar, vocabulary, and reading abilities via multiple-choice items delivered online. After extensive field testing, students’ responses to each of the test’s items were submitted to complex mathematical procedures using Item Response Theory, which allow for precise calibrations of each item’s difficulty level. In this way, the exam is able to quickly, interactively adapt to students’ respective ability levels, producing a score in as short as 20 to 25 minutes. This efficient approach to program placement appealed to many schools and, as of the summer of 2016, was used by approximately 660 colleges and universities across the country (Dustin Thacker, Perpetual Technology Group, personal communication). De-identified WebCAPE scores from 12,826 Spanish, 2,988 French, and 1,009 German tests taken by University of Kentucky students from June 2002 to June 2015 were analyzed to allow for comparisons of the raw number of placement exams taken in each language and the average score levels. At the University of Kentucky, students took the exam in a proctored environment in the department office; but they were able to take the exam more than once, given the variable nature of the test items presented to them. Before the scores were de-identified and analyzed, students with identical first and last names or identification numbers were located, and only their first attempt at the exam was included.
On several occasions, we cite compelling institutional data collected at our respective universities, the University of Kentucky and Brigham Young University. These two universities and their Spanish programs clearly do not and cannot represent the wide variety of programs across the United States and their respective curricula and stakeholders. However, Brigham Young University and the University of Kentucky represent two rather distinct profiles—one, a large, rather selective, private religious university in the Intermountain West; and the other, a large, public land-grant research university in the Southeast. In including these schools, we had two goals: (1) to demonstrate in a concrete way how the trends and curricular phenomena we reference are manifest in real programs, even those of very distinct profiles, like ours; and (2) to encourage readers to investigate and corroborate the trends we have identified in our institutions by engaging in similar research at their institutions. We cite a variety of statistics from the number of majors and minors to the number of AP exam candidates and their scores, all of which serve to illustrate the changing nature of Spanish postsecondary education.