LSP [language for specific purposes] is a square peg that we are trying to fit into the round hole of traditional university language curricula (literature and linguistics).
—Barbara Lafford, Ann Abbott, and Darcy Lear, “Spanish in the Professions,” 2014
The movement advocating language for specific purposes (LSP)—or, more specifically, Spanish for specific purposes (Spanish LSP1)—represents a crucial component of twenty-first-century Spanish curricula because it aims to bridge the gap between what students learn in the classroom and their use of it outside the classroom. The World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages—from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, with its 5 Cs—have particular relevance for Spanish LSP, especially connections, comparisons, and communities. Although postsecondary foreign language (FL) curricula have included LSP courses for several decades, current trends in higher education have placed LSP courses squarely in the spotlight as the embodiment of the conflicted nature of contemporary collegiate FL curricula more specifically. Despite pedagogic and curricular innovations, LSP represents the tension that exists between traditional, humanistic curricula on one hand and practical, vocationally focused curricula on the other hand. As Lafford, Abbott, and Lear (2014) point out in the epigraph above, LSP—and in our case, Spanish for specific purposes (Spanish LSP)—often seems to occupy the liminal and somewhat marginalized space between purely literary, cultural, or linguistic approaches to language study, and vocationally targeted approaches to practical language learning and contextualized use.
Scholars such as Beltrán (2004) cite the confluence of economic, social, intellectual, and political factors soon after the close of World War II that propelled English to the status of international lingua franca and precipitated the subsequent appearance of the LSP movement. Factors that led to heightened demand for second-language (L2) pedagogy tailored to specific academic and professional domains include the rapid rate of scientific discovery and innovation, the increase of transnational trade, the speed and facility of information dissemination, the rise of the United States as an economic superpower, and the evolution of various subfields within linguistics (applied linguistics, socio-linguistics, psycholinguistics) (Beltrán 2004). The field congealed more firmly in the United Kingdom after Halliday, Strevens, and McIntosh (1964) advocated for research that could empirically validate the professional language presented in pedagogical materials aimed at equipping learners of English with domain-specific linguistic skills. José María de Tomás Puch (2004, 1149) argues that technological innovations and the appearance of electronic communication have led to increased contact between professionals from different countries and have generated foreign language students with a profile “very different from years past.”2
Additional momentum for LSP was provided by several scholars in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and L2 acquisition. Hymes’s (1972) conceptualization of communicative competence directly countered Noam Chomsky’s assertions regarding language competence by arguing that true competence in any interpersonal communicative interaction requires more than a mastery of highly abstract syntactic rules and universal principles and parameters. Of a somewhat similar intellectual persuasion was Halliday (1961), whose systemic-functional linguistics claimed that the language system and the functions for which it is used maintain a bidirectional relationship rather than a unidirectional one in which the linguistic system dictates how certain communicative functions can be fulfilled. Hyland (2011) argues for specificity in L2 pedagogy, as in the case of LSP, from even the most elementary levels, given the nonlinear nature of L2 acquisition and the fact that learners acquire features of the language as they need them rather than in a specific order. He cites social constructivism as additional theoretical support for the LSP enterprise, given its claim that each profession and discipline constructs its own worldview via unique discourses. These scholars’ contributions have provided additional theoretical and intellectual backing for the LSP movement among L2 educators, who began to appreciate the value in instructing learners explicitly in domain-specific discourses and genres embedded within their corresponding social and cultural milieus.
The changing nature of modern higher education in the United States and its principal objectives also have contributed to the rise of LSP in collegiate curricula on many US campuses. Most notably, Derek Bok (2006) has examined the tension that has arisen for many universities between the need to simultaneously provide students with a liberal, humanistic education—historically focused on intellectual discovery, character development, and mental discipline—while also preparing them for gainful employment and a successful career by equipping them with practical knowledge and skill sets. José (2014, 15) discusses this debate and recounts the difficult conversations that one of his students frequently had with her parents while deciding on a major. On one occasion, while he was meeting with the student in his office, her parents texted the following message: “[Humanities majors] are unemployed, unemployable and bound to menial jobs.” Instead of simply preparing university students to become informed, engaged members of an educated citizenry committed to the betterment of society, university studies are seen as a financial investment whose corresponding curricula must respond to the larger socioeconomic forces at play. This is directly reflected in the large numbers of university students who choose business as a major and the diminishing number who pursue studies in the arts and sciences.
In their seminal article on LSP in American higher education, Grosse and Voght (1991, 29) attributed the inclusion of LSP in the FL curriculum to the general need to promote greater foreign language study, to expand the curriculum, and to incorporate humanistic approaches into professional education, and also as a way to address calls for the internationalization of university curricula. Nevertheless, they do acknowledge “diverse and powerful forces” that have led to the inclusion of LSP courses in FL curricula, citing Kramsch’s (1989) rather candid assessment of the state of foreign language teaching and learning in the late 1980s: “Kramsch attributes the national trend toward broadening the nature of language study to economic and political pressures, rather than to a renewed interest in humanistic education per se” (Grosse and Voght (1991, 31).
In the ensuing years since 1989, and even since the 2007 MLA report, it has become quite clear that foreign language departments—like all disciplines in the humanities—have had to become much more responsive to the socioeconomic and sociopolitical realities students face upon exit from their programs in the design and deployment of their curricula. The creation of LSP courses and programs represents one concrete instantiation of this reality.
Several useful definitions of LSP have surfaced over the ensuing years, as the field has striven to demarcate its own intellectual borders. Ken Hyland (2011, 201), a preeminent scholar in the field of English for specific purposes, offers the following definition: “Specific purposes teaching refers to a distinctive approach to language education based on identification of the specific language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups, and on teaching practices that recognize the particular subject matter needs and expertise of learners.”
Arnó-Macià (2012, 90) states that LSP centers on “the learner’s need to participate effectively in the target academic or professional community. LSP courses are thus cost-effective and rooted in the texts and practices of the target disciplines.” Lafford (2012, 2) provided a rather succinct, yet precise, definition, asserting that the primary goal of LSP is “to prepare language students for the practical application of their L2 in professional environments.”
Dan Douglas (2000, 19), an assessment specialist, offers an implicit definition of LSP, while differentiating LSP tests from general second-language tests: “Test content and methods are derived from an analysis of a specific purpose target language use situation, so that test tasks and content are authentically representative of tasks in the target situation, allowing for . . . inferences about a test taker’s capacity to use language in the specific purpose domain.”
These definitions have several things in common: (1) they all differentiate LSP pedagogy and assessment from traditional second-language pedagogy, using such terms as distinctive—essentially carving out a unique intellectual space for LSP within applied linguistics; and (2) they highlight the importance of accurately identifying the specific discursive, linguistic, cultural, and communicative characteristics of each specific-use context before any attempts at instruction or assessment are made. Though other scholars have problematized these characterizations of LSP (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014; Sullivan 2012) for various reasons, it is clear that effective LSP pedagogy and assessment is context dependent and heavily reliant upon an accurate needs analysis, characteristics of LSP that Basturkmen (2012, 62) calls “key course design processes.”
In more concrete terms, scholars have found that LSP courses cover a wide variety of subject areas in addition to business and medicine. In their 2011 survey, which replicated Grosse and Voght’s (1990) research, Long and Uscinski (2012) added four more disciplines—education, nursing, translation, and engineering—to the previous six that Grosse and Voght included—business, medicine, law, public programs, technology, and other—for a total of ten. In the 2011 version, the second-most-used category of the ten was “other,” making up 21 percent of courses, as compared with 12 percent in Grosse and Voght’s research in the late 1980s. Not surprisingly, the subject areas that Long and Ucsinski reference as examples of the increasingly diverse nature of LSP offerings come from Spanish curricula: “Spanish for hotel, tourism and restaurant management” and “Spanish for criminal justice,” though the majority of Spanish LSP courses relate to business and medical Spanish.
As a now-well-established field within applied linguistics, LSP has its own research agenda and preferred teaching methodology. Empirical studies in LSP draw upon research methods in related areas within applied linguistics, such as critical genre analysis, conversation analysis, register analysis, and corpus-based lexical analysis (Bowles 2012). Likewise, LSP pedagogy presents a hybridized approach, with many methods being adopted and adapted from communicative language teaching, task-based language teaching, and content-based instruction. José (2014) highlights the potential of LSP pedagogy to bridge the gap between the educational and professional spheres, as it transitions students from producing low-stakes work for private consumption—that is, the course instructor—to higher-stakes projects open to public scrutiny by much larger audiences—for example, potential employers and customers. In terms of both research and teaching, English has been the primary focus of LSP around the globe for several decades, given its status as a lingua franca in many domains, for example, information technology, business, and medicine. Nevertheless, other superlanguages, such as Chinese and Spanish, are gaining ground in the field of LSP (Hyland 2011).
Fryer (2012) cites Eastern Michigan University as one of the first institutions to undertake non-English LSP curriculum development in 1979, arguing that the number of undergraduate programs subsequently skyrocketed in the 1990s. Beltrán (2004, 1113–14) traces the increased demand for and consolidation of Spanish LSP, primarily business Spanish, back to the 1980s, and he notes “interest on the part of academic and professional institutions to harness this demand (universities, cabinets of commerce and industry, language academies, etc.) and the resulting start of publishing activity in the field.”3 Surveys of collegiate course offerings conducted over the past thirty years (Grosse 1985; Grosse and Voght 1990; Schulz 1979) have corroborated the solid footing that LSP has achieved in postsecondary curricula.
More recent survey research conducted by Long and Uzcinski (2012) has indicated that among non-English LSP programs, Spanish LSP programs were by far the most common. Long and Uscinski also found that 43 percent of all non-English business courses were ones in Spanish business. Our own analysis of nine prominent American universities’ course catalogs indicated that the average number of Spanish for the professions courses increased from four to thirty between academic years 1970–71 and 2015–16, and courses in translation and interpretation increased from one to nine during the same period. Moreover, Peris and Cubillos (2015) noted that among the three most prominent North American publishing houses, there are approximately twenty-seven titles in Spanish for special purposes, with Cengage responsible for seventeen of the twenty-seven. Along with the numbers of Spanish LSP textbooks being published by large publishing houses, the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese has published several volumes related to Spanish LSP (Doyle 1945; Fryer and Guntermann 1998; Walsh 1969), foremost among them being an edited, textbook-length volume titled Spanish and Portuguese for Business and the Professions (Fryer and Guntermann 1998). Finally, the inception of academic programs of study (majors, minors, tracks, etc.), federally funded research centers (Centers for International Business Education and Research), scholarly journals (Revista Ibérica), and international conferences (International Symposium on Languages for Specific Purposes) that focus on LSP all attest to the significant presence of LSP among postsecondary Spanish FL curricula.
José (2014, 18) argues that the field shows signs of “both maturity and infancy” in his discussion of current issues and conversations, in what he calls “language studies.” In spite of the increased attention paid to LSP courses and curricula in contemporary postsecondary Spanish programs, there are indications that the outlook for LSP is not quite as bright as it may superficially appear and that significant obstacles still need to be overcome on many levels before Spanish LSP courses are coherently and effectively integrated into current curricular structures in American higher education. For example, Long and Uscinski (2012) found that the percentage of institutions offering LSP courses had not significantly changed over the nearly thirty-year period between Grosse’s 1985 survey and their own published in a special issue of the Modern Language Journal in 2012. Furthermore, Abbott (personal communication) points out that what appears to be a surge in LSP textbook publishing due to increased Spanish LSP enrollments in universities may more accurately reflect aggressive marketing campaigns aimed at recouping costs.
The next section systematically addresses issues that apply directly, and at times uniquely, to collegiate Spanish programs as they seek to successfully integrate LSP courses into their curricula. The analyses of the difficulties outlined in the literature are complemented by our own experiences with Spanish for specific purposes at our respective institutions and from the results of survey research targeting the issues that contemporary Spanish programs face with regard to Spanish for specific purposes. To conclude the chapter, we take stock of the implications of our analyses regarding future opportunities and challenges that courses and programs on Spanish for specific purposes present for Spanish language programs in the twenty-first century.
Scholars raise similar challenges for LSP in slightly different ways throughout the literature, some of which seem to apply to all second-language and foreign language contexts, some solely to English as a second language, and others to Spanish as a nonmajority language—the focus of this book. In this section, we examine potential difficulties for LSP at the postsecondary level in general, while highlighting key differences between Spanish LSP courses in the United States and other languages and contexts. The challenges that postsecondary Spanish language educators may face have been organized into three general categories, which are discussed in turn: (1) Spanish LSP students, their profile, and their needs; (2) Spanish LSP curricula; and (3) instructional staff and institutional culture. As we have done throughout the book thus far, we have interwoven our own experiences with the issues raised here in order to provide background for and concrete examples of the challenges we cite.
The bedrock of curricular innovation in any foreign language program or department is, or should be, a thorough and accurate needs analysis. This is especially true of Spanish LSP at the undergraduate level in the Anglo-American academy, for several reasons. First, although surely many Spanish LSP students in Anglo-American institutions are sufficiently motivated—particularly those embedded in highly specialized and structured programs, such as the School of Foreign Service Program at Georgetown University described by Martinez and Sanz (2008)—some may lack motivation or struggle to relate their learning to future employment opportunities. It would come as no surprise if the average English for specific purposes (ESP) student enrolled in an English-medium intensive language institute, or even matriculated students in credit-bearing courses, felt much more urgency to master the course material than the average Spanish LSP student enrolled in a three-year business Spanish course as an elective toward his or her general Spanish major. For the ESP student embedded in an English dominant society, mastery of the course content is fundamental for employment, while some Spanish LSP students may view the course(s) as an additional line on the transcript or résumé aimed at impressing future employers or graduate school admissions officers.
As Lafford, Abbott, and Lear (2014) point out, undergraduate students are often unsure of the specific profession they will pursue after finishing their college degrees, or are unable to anticipate professional opportunities that may arise midcareer, or may simply be forced by circumstances out of their control to change careers multiple times over their lifetime. As such, students who are not sure of their needs or of how Spanish LSP might fit into their larger academic and professional goals may struggle to muster the motivation necessary to learn about liabilities, risk management, or supply chains in Spanish. If a Spanish LSP course simultaneously fulfills an elective for the general Spanish major and at the same time a core requirement for an interdisciplinary double major in international studies and economics, student motivations, proficiency, and background knowledge can vary tremendously. The more specific the content focus of the Spanish LSP course, the more homogeneous one would expect students’ motivations and professional aspirations to be. Nevertheless, greater specificity comes at a cost, for the pool of students will inevitably shrink, leading to reduced enrollments—a cardinal sin in an era of revenue-generating budget models. Conversely, as the needs and abilities of students in the same course or of those who pursue the same program of study become more diverse, it becomes more difficult to appropriately cater instruction.
What compounds the situation even further is the textbook-driven nature of many Spanish programs and how a textbook-driven curriculum may appear to obviate the need for detailed needs analyses. Although Hyland (2011, 204) calls needs assessment in LSP “foundational” and a “continuous process,” in many cases it appears to have been relegated to textbook companies. The applied linguist Bill VanPatten (2015, 10) bemoans the overuse of textbooks in Spanish language teaching more generally and argues that, despite competition, “language textbooks look amazingly alike, with only superficial differences.” To maximize their profitability, textbooks must assume a certain degree of homogeneity to be marketable to the widest audience possible. The perennial issue of finding the appropriate degree of authenticity and specificity in LSP (Arnó-Macià 2012) that matches local students’ needs is particularly pronounced in Spanish LSP courses, which may attract a wide variety of students enrolled in the course to fulfill a multiplicity of requirements.
In theory, an effective needs analysis for Spanish LSP would achieve the maximum degree of alignment between course content (i.e., linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary) and students’ future use of it in work-related contexts, or what Lafford (2012, 3) has called “potential applicability.” An example of misalignment occurs in undergraduate programs that use business Spanish textbooks that focus on terminology and concepts geared toward graduate students seeking managerial degrees (e.g., MBA, MPA), who will most likely be responsible for weighty administrative matters such as supply chains, risk management, and insurance liability in international contexts. In contrast, the majority of students in undergraduate courses will most likely be called upon to use their Spanish domestically to interface with lower-middle-class to working-class Spanish speakers in customer service or sales encounters. The Hispanic and Spanish-speaking market is growing tremendously in the United States, according to Nataly Kelly, in her 2014 Harvard Business Review article “Will Spanish Help You Reach the US Hispanic Market? It Depends.” Kelly notes that by 2050, Hispanics could make up 30 percent of the US population, and she outlines concrete strategies for marketing online to Hispanics. She cites Humphries (2012), who projected that Hispanics’ purchasing power would reach $1.5 trillion by 2015.
The number of Hispanics in the United States is not only increasing precipitously among the general population but also within elementary, secondary, and postsecondary classrooms. As the number of heritage language learners has risen, so too has the number of educational programs designed to address these students’ unique sociolinguistic profile in the Spanish classroom. Heritage learners bring to the Spanish classroom a set of characteristics that differ markedly from traditional students of Spanish as a foreign language, for linguistic, cognitive, cultural, and social reasons. Even within the heritage language learner population, there is a wide variety of proficiency levels in Spanish, and the strength of learners’ connections to Hispanic cultures also varies.
Nevertheless, the Spanish LSP classroom has the potential to maximize heritage language learners’ linguistic, cultural, and social capital. Lear’s (2012, 164) argument that community service learning (CSL) “provides unique opportunities for heritage learners” and allows them to “bring their strengths to bear in CSL language courses” can easily be applied to Spanish LSP. Spanish LSP courses—such as business, medical, and legal Spanish, along with translation—quite naturally lead to interaction with native speakers of students’ heritage language and culture outside the classroom. However, the incorporation of heritage language learners into Spanish LSP classrooms—and particularly community, site-based projects—must be done carefully, taking into account heritage learners’ cultural, social, and linguistic profiles, so as to maximize each student’s learning potential and his or her contribution to the community.
Although the number and purchasing power of Hispanic and Spanish-speaking consumers is growing in the United States, what is much less clear is the extent to which Spanish is needed among upper-level management and to what degree business professionals interface with Spanish-dominant or monolingual Spanish speakers in the domestic, Anglo-American context. What business Spanish students need from a linguistic standpoint seems to be more closely tied to retail sales and customer service than human resources, insurance, supply chains, or banking. In fact, it may be that for many students, even those who plan on using their Spanish abroad but especially those who plan on using Spanish domestically, the higher they aim as far as their professional and managerial aspirations are concerned, the less imperative it becomes that they master complex business concepts in Spanish. Orlando Kelm (2014, 45) discusses this issue at length by presenting several personal anecdotes that corroborate his conclusion “that English as a lingua franca has a stronghold among international professionals.” As a result, he recommends that “the need, role, and scope of teaching other foreign languages for professional purposes” be reassessed.
One poignant example comes from the experience of an upper-level manager who was invited to speak to business Spanish students at the University of Kentucky. The students were impressed that the guest speaker had obtained some proficiency in Spanish after a religious mission, but when pressed about his experiences using Spanish extensively as a professional with international clients abroad, he admitted that most interactions abroad were conducted in English, after simple pleasantries had been exchanged in Spanish. He bemoaned the fact that in spite of his extensive travel in Spanish-speaking countries, his Spanish was not what it used to be because most business meetings and negotiations were conducted in English to accommodate the US-based transnational corporation. Unlike ESP contexts, in which a lack of proficiency in professional and academic discourses in English serves to limit access to powerful communities of practice (Hyland 2011), the situation is much less dire for English-dominant learners of Spanish LSP, especially in the domestic university context. As fluent speakers of the world’s lingua franca, aspiring business students in Anglo-American institutions who do not take business Spanish are not affected nearly as much as limited proficient users of English who are unable to enroll in business English. Moreover, Kedia and Daniel (2003) found that employers ranked cross-cultural sensitivity as the most desirable international skill among their employees, while foreign language skills received the lowest rating on the survey. Although the smaller businesses in José’s (2014) study did not seem as concerned about cultural awareness among employees, the larger companies expressed a clear preference for employees who demonstrate cultural sensitivity.
Similarly, students enrolled in a course on Hispanic bilingualism in the US at the same university who expressed interest in using their Spanish while helping Hispanic children with their homework at a local public library were disappointed to learn that almost all the children spoke English perfectly and preferred English over Spanish. During her visit as a guest speaker to the class, the branch librarian clarified that in most cases Spanish proficiency was not needed for the children’s learning issues, but rather to help their parents successfully complete required forms and to navigate a completely unfamiliar educational system. In the educational and commercial contexts cited above, it was not that Spanish proficiency was not needed, but that it did not seem to reflect what was offered via a formal course.
Indeed, some students may ultimately find themselves in situations that require the highly technical and discipline-specific language covered in Spanish LSP courses, but these contexts also require high levels of overall proficiency and oral fluency, usually beyond what is generally attainable after a four-year degree program. For example, a Spanish major who has taken a course in medical Spanish may aspire to work as a hospital interpreter, only to quickly realize that her command of domain-specific vocabulary does not compensate for underdeveloped language proficiency, particularly aural comprehension deployed during emotionally charged encounters. She may find herself relegated to tasks that mostly require general Spanish terminology as she helps direct Spanish-speaking patients to the right office or wing of the hospital, or she may potentially use a limited amount of her medical Spanish during very basic and brief triage encounters. Somewhat ironically, Kelm (2014, 50) defends the development of LSP proficiency as a way “to be part of the nonbusiness side of business,” citing greater understanding of current events, politics, religion, local culture, and other areas accessible via general L2 proficiency.
The Office of Postsecondary Education (2010) noted that employers wanting to expand their business abroad struggle to find multilingual applicants who have achieved advanced or superior levels of proficiency. Long and Uscinski (2012) found that though more lower-level courses are being offered than in the past, higher-level courses still make up a large majority of LSP course offerings. Unfortunately, research has demonstrated that a typical four-year sequence at the university level is insufficient for students to achieve high levels of proficiency (Magnan 1986; Norris and Pfeiffer 2003; Swender 2003). Lafford (2012) attributes the relatively low levels of proficiency among students entering LSP classes to weak or nearly nonexistent FL programs in the elementary schools. Similarly, Kelm (2014) laments the limited time made available to Anglo-American primary and secondary students to learn additional languages.
For Spanish LSP courses to be more relevant for university students and more successful in the twenty-first century, more meaningful and valid needs analyses must be done that extend beyond textbook selection and that do not assume, necessarily, that students will use their newly acquired skills abroad, or that they will form part of upper-level management, or that they will engage in emotionally charged, highly technical health care encounters as interpreters. In spite of some domain-specific needs analyses, such as that done by Lear (2005), Spanish language educators must do more to focus on the needs of their LSP students and to determine how their program’s students are actually using Spanish on the job after graduating and how these uses correspond to the content and learning objectives of Spanish LSP courses. Ideally, as advocated by José (2014), students’ needs would align well with their employees’ perceived needs with regard to Spanish language use in the workplace. When asked why they incorporated LSP into their curricula, Long and Uscinski (2012) found that educational institutions ranked employers’ needs the lowest. Although the institutional needs of universities and their efforts at self-preservation are always present, and at times are incredibly powerful, students’ well-assessed needs should remain paramount so as to avoid the “tendency to accept institutional imperatives in defining needs too readily” (Hyland 2011, 215), especially when done under the auspices of addressing student demand, attracting new students, or grooming future donors (Lear 2012; Long and Ucsinski 2012).
Regardless of language, LSP courses must find a balance between what Doyle (2012, 108) calls a “tripartite integrated curricular structure,” in which topical knowledge interfaces with domain-specific linguistic skills, and cultural knowledge. Whether the task is to design a single Spanish LSP course or a series of courses, the question remains the same: To what extent should the course, or courses, focus on content and concepts unique to the specific subject matter, on lexicogrammatical and discursive features most common to the domain, or on the sociocultural mores that characterize each respective speech community? These features of an LSP course are only complicated by varying levels of language proficiency, background knowledge, and cultural awareness among students, which makes vertical articulation and the use of prerequisites so crucial to the success of any Spanish LSP course or program (Brown 2014).
The issue of balancing topical knowledge versus language ability in LSP is particularly salient when designing valid assessments because a defining characteristic of LSP is the ability to communicate about topics within a specific domain, and not just about general interest topics. Bachman and Palmer (1996) outline three possibilities for addressing the interaction between language ability and content knowledge on second-language assessments, asserting that inferences from test results may focus (1) solely on language ability among students whose background knowledge varies widely, (2) on language ability and background knowledge among a rather homogeneous group of students, and (3) on two separate constructs if test developers are unsure of students’ background knowledge. Douglas (2000, 22) opines that the first scenario laid out by Bachman and Palmer is “not relevant to the LSP testing enterprise,” and it may not be for a fine-tuned ESP program with clear, curricular-level structures, placement procedures, and enrollment guidelines in place. But for a Spanish undergraduate LSP course or program, it may very much represent reality. Hyland (2011, 212) proposes an “adjunct model,” in which an LSP course is linked with a content course, a somewhat common approach used for international students associated with an intensive English institute, but a much more difficult proposition for Spanish language departments and programs, given the limited personnel and resources most programs can allocate to perceived overlaps in course coverage and staffing.
As mentioned above, one of the greatest challenges for Spanish LSP courses and LSP courses in any language is drastic diversity in language proficiency, background knowledge, or both. Course prerequisites may serve to reduce differences among students, but whether to impose language-based or content-based prerequisites can be difficult to determine. Clapham’s (1996) study of the relationship between topical knowledge and general language proficiency indicated that until students reached a certain threshold of language ability—specifically, structural understanding—their topical knowledge could not be fully activated. Nevertheless, if minimum proficiency levels had been reached, topical knowledge had a stronger effect on student performance when presented with reading texts that were highly specific. For many years, the University of Kentucky had one business Spanish course, whose only prerequisite was the successful completion of the fifth-semester grammar and conversation courses. This course enrolled students from both extremes of the topical and language proficiency continuum. At one end of the continuum were the students pursuing a double major in business or economics and Spanish, who possessed strong Spanish skills and had extensive exposure to fundamental business concepts. At the other end of the spectrum sat the Spanish minors, who had just completed their 200-level, fifth-semester courses, who possessed somewhat weak Spanish skills, and who had no exposure to any business concepts at all. Due to this tremendous diversity, along with other factors discussed in the following section, Spanish LSP courses may present quite a challenge to instructors striving to find a balance between developing topical knowledge and language proficiency. As a result, the ability to maintain ecological validity for each respective LSP student and his or her needs in LSP testing is formidable (Lafford 2012).
The third element that should form part of LSP curricula and that has recently received greater attention in the LSP literature pertains to the cultural and discursive contextualization of specific LSP domains. Although the debate over how much language to teach and how much topical content to include will surely persist, Bowles (2012, 53) notes that current issues relate to the “greater contextualization of discourse, moving away from a concentration on lexicogrammatical features of text to include analysis of spoken and written discourses of specific domains as they occur in real time”—and, one might add, in real social and cultural groups. Professional communities of all types not only have their own technical jargon and unique discourse but also their own sociocultural values, mores, and power structures that make that discourse interpretable. Second-language learners must understand the cultural subtleties associated with each domain’s discourse to become legitimate peripheral participants in a specific community of practice—using Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) terminology. In Doyle’s (2012) discussion of the cultural implications of business language studies, he cites a poignant observation made by Galloway (1987, 69) that to develop students’ linguistic skills without sensitizing them to the surrounding cultural context is “to provide students with the illusion that they are communicating.” Cross-cultural sensitivity weighs heavily on the minds of international companies looking to hire employees (Kedia and Daniel 2003), and more recent research (Language Flagship 2008) has indicated that companies desire employees with much greater language proficiency. However, many surveys of international companies’ needs are quite general and do not specify the exact nature of the cross-cultural sensitivity needed or the linguistic competence required of employees at different levels who fulfill diverse functions. What sort of cultural and linguistic proficiency, for example, would an appliance salesperson or customer service representative need to interact with Spanish-speaking colleagues?
Another cultural component of LSP curricula that is particularly relevant for Spanish courses and programs relates to the larger sociopolitical realities, hierarchies, and power structures into which Anglo-American students will most likely deploy the knowledge and skills they acquire in LSP courses. Previously, we highlighted Hyland’s (2011) observation that to not offer ESP courses to students of English as a second language would be to disempower and potentially disenfranchise them from the surrounding society, especially those working in English-majority societies. In the case of the Anglo-American student, the potential exists that added Spanish LSP knowledge and skills will unwittingly lead to the perpetuation of sociopolitical and socioeconomic inequities, both domestically and abroad. As native speakers of English from the wealthiest and largest capitalist economy in the world, Anglo-American students who add Spanish LSP knowledge to the social, cultural, and linguistic capital they already possess are perfectly situated to assume a position of power in future professional endeavors. Not all Spanish LSP students will ultimately possess this capital and wield this power, but they will surely be exposed to social injustice as they interact with repressed and marginalized Spanish-speaking populations on American soil and abroad.
This fact was made clear to one of the authors on two occasions: (1) during a study abroad trip to Ecuador with a service-learning focus, and (2) during the presentation of a local business executive to business Spanish students. As part of the study abroad program, the Anglo-American students were briefly trained in dental terminology so they could engage in free dental fairs for underprivileged populations in Ecuador. After efforts to serve the Afro-Ecuadorean population in northern Ecuador were rebuffed by the province’s minister of health, presumably to avoid the appearance of needing help from Americans, one student reacted strongly to the perceived injustice in her class journal: “It just seems to be that people of color, especially of African descent, seem to be so suppressed everywhere around the world. . . . It just made me think what the real reason . . . behind not allowing free aid to those who needed it?! It’s ridiculous!”
The second experience illustrating the reality of socioeconomic inequities that relate to Spanish LSP occurred when an executive from a transnational business who had spent time in Guatemala was invited to speak to business Spanish students at the University of Kentucky. His business specialized in outsourcing the processing of credit card applications and insurance claims to offshore, international locations. The executive explained to students how he struggled to transform the workplace culture to align more closely with a merit-oriented system and how this transformation required that some underperforming workers be laid off. As a result of these personnel decisions and other policy changes, he and his family were threatened with physical violence through anonymous letters and workplace graffiti. He recounted to the business Spanish students that in response to these threats, he convened a meeting with all the workers and told them quite candidly that if the threats persisted, the company would simply close the center and exit the country, leaving all the workers unemployed. The tactic apparently worked because the threats ceased and operations at the center improved. Although it is hard to determine what would have been the best course of action for this American executive in these circumstances, it is easy to note the tremendous power differential between the executive, the American company he represented, and the Guatemalan workers.
In summary, it is inevitable that the students who choose to parlay the skills and knowledge they acquire in a Spanish LSP course into a career will confront, at some point, issues of social injustice and inequity. Students may encounter these inequities in a remote village in northern Ecuador, at an American-run factory in Guatemala, in a free health clinic for Spanish-speakers in the US, or even within the walls of their local elementary school. The forward-thinking Spanish educator must determine to what extent the Spanish LSP curriculum should empower Anglo-American students with the linguistic and content skills needed to interface with Spanish-speaking populations without informing them of larger social issues that professionals in these fields often confront. In essence, should the socially responsible Spanish LSP curriculum include greater emphasis on macro sociopolitical issues and not just micro linguistic and content issues?
In a recent review article on the current state of Spanish in the professions, Lafford, Abbott, and Lear (2014, 176) note the ever-increasing number of diverse LSP courses cropping up in foreign language programs and make a somewhat provocative proposal: “a single foundational course on translingual and transcultural issues in professional contexts.” In their view, the increase in more, and more specific, LSP courses presupposes a more static professional environment than most contemporary college graduates will face. They envision a course that broaches skills that nearly all college graduates should develop, from task-specific skills used while engaging in a telephone conversation or giving/taking instructions to broader skills such as teamwork, creativity, and respect for diversity. Not surprisingly, the skills that Lafford, Abbott, and Lear propose for a redesigned LSP course mirror those chosen by employers surveyed by José (2014). They further argue that key professional skills should be not be limited to a single LSP course and should be distributed throughout the curriculum, permeating all levels and topical areas. In line with the sort of curricular overhaul envisioned in the 2007 MLA report, Lafford and her colleagues champion a “paradigmatic restructuring” of the curriculum that would integrate “professionalism and interdisciplinarity throughout the language course sequences” (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014, 183). Indeed, such efforts would constitute a true curricular overhaul and a rather radical departure from business as usual in many postsecondary Spanish programs.
Finally, LSP curricula for all languages must respond to a much larger, and somewhat threatening, question that can be stated simply: Does it work? In the case of ESP, Master (2005, 111) notes that “despite 30 years of calls for empirical research demonstrating the efficacy of ESP, not a single published study has appeared to this end.” Lear (2012) also comments on the need for program evaluation in LSP. In concrete terms, do university students who enroll in Spanish LSP courses perform better in subsequent, real-life encounters that require mastery of domain-specific content, culture, and language; or would it be better to continue developing general proficiency without the added topical focus—a possibility tentatively supported by Clapham’s (1996) research? Are students’ needs with regard to their use of Spanish in the work environment sufficiently delimited to warrant the time and effort spent in Spanish LSP courses? In programs with only one or two Spanish LSP courses of a particular domain—for example, business or medical—that are loosely connected to an academic major or minor, these questions demand close scrutiny.
Within the field of foreign language teaching at the collegiate level, there is little debate that curricular change is necessary to maintain relevance in the academy, as the case of Spanish LSP clearly illustrates. Closely connected to curricular revision and essential to its success are the instructors who are tasked with implementing the changes in the classroom. The instructional staff members who constitute the foundation of any language program have a deep impact on and are affected by curricular changes, regardless of their academic and professional profile, and this is especially the case in Spanish LSP. Moreover, they influence and are influenced by institutional culture and the degree to which this culture values and prioritizes the goals and pedagogy that lie at the heart of Spanish LSP. In this section of the chapter, we look more closely at Spanish LSP postsecondary instructional staff members and their profile, along with worrisome trends with regard to institutional culture that plague many disciplines in the academy.
One of the foremost challenges Spanish language programs of all sizes have faced with regard to LSP has been the ability to hire qualified instructors from within their own ranks to teach courses with a nonhumanistic focus, such as Spanish for business professionals, or medical Spanish, or Spanish for social workers. In their survey research, Long and Uscinski (2012) report that most LSP courses are taught in language departments rather than discipline-specific departments. Nevertheless, 81 percent of language departments noted that they had non-LSP faculty teaching LSP courses. Many Spanish departments, their faculty, and their curricula have been slow to evolve from a traditional, humanities-centered program with literature, culture, and linguistics at the core to a dynamic, interdisciplinary program that is much more expansive and eclectic in its offerings and pedagogies. It is the latter configuration that society seems to be demanding of language programs, and the former that needs updating. In their review of LSP over twenty years ago, Grosse and Vaught (1991) highlighted the widely varying levels of training among LSP instructors in the field of the LSP course. Ene (2012) observed that in many cases, current LSP practitioners and researchers who received their degrees in traditional language and literature departments got their start as LSP instructors with no experience in the domain area—for example, business, health care, and engineering.
The expertise and training in the content domain or in LSP pedagogy that many Spanish LSP instructors bring with them to their first day of class, in most cases, is minimal or nonexistent. The lingering question in LSP pedagogy and language programs is whether it is more effective to have a content specialist or a language specialist at the front of the classroom, assuming that both are available. Master (2005) discusses this issue in some detail, and cites opposing arguments made by Taylor (1994) and Troike (1994), both of whom appear to be language specialists. Although Taylor feels comfortable claiming that English language teaching specialists with the right attitude and enough interest are better equipped to help students develop LSP proficiency than content experts, Troike does not. He argues that it is far easier to train a content specialist in the basics of language pedagogy than the reverse—that is, to train language educators in the technical content of the LSP domain. Even when a course is team taught, Basturkmen (2012, 66) points out that the language instructor is often considered the “junior partner.”
The preceding discussion of instructor expertise and training seems to make several subtle assumptions: (1) that Spanish instructors asked to teach LSP courses are interested in teaching them, (2) that Spanish instructors are willing to remediate any deficiencies in technical content knowledge, and (3) that subject specialists might be available and willing to co-teach or consult a Spanish LSP course—a contingency more likely in the ESP than the Spanish LSP context, given greater access to subject specialists proficient in English. Experience has proven time and again that when a disconnect occurs between an instructor’s training and the courses he or she is asked to teach, the results are less than favorable. VanPatten (2015) has argued this point quite convincingly with regard to the impact that the overall lack of language specialists in language departments has on program effectiveness. His review of departmental websites from French and Spanish programs at research, doctoral-granting institutions in the Midwest, in the East, and on the West Coast revealed that among full-time, tenured, and tenure-line faculty members, scholars trained in literary and cultural studies were grossly overrepresented. The lowest proportion of literary and cultural studies scholars was slightly more than three-fourths (76 percent), in the case of Spanish departments in the Midwest, though the highest proportion was found for French scholars in the East, who made up 96 percent of language professors. The highest rate for scholars of literature and culture in Spanish programs was found among the West Coast schools, with 90 percent. When all the programs and geographic areas were averaged together, nearly 80 percent of all tenured/tenure-line scholars in French and Spanish specialized in literary and cultural studies. Experience has shown that the teaching pool within a language department from which to select even semiqualified instructors for Spanish LSP courses has been quite small, and that some within this pool demonstrate great resistance to teaching Spanish LSP courses, such as business Spanish.
The hesitancy that many non-LSP instructors display when asked to teach an LSP course or to be trained to teach such courses may reflect a much larger issue in contemporary higher education, that is, the creation of disciplinary “silo walls” (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014, 174). In fact, Lafford and her colleagues call it the “biggest challenge for . . . LSP” (p. 180), while Fryer (2012, 134) points out the “willfully obstructionist” stance that some faculty have taken toward the integration of LSP into the curriculum and toward overall curricular reform. The resistance by many faculty to welcome Spanish LSP into the standard curriculum may also manifest itself negatively in promotion and tenure cases for candidates who specialize in LSP research and teaching. The perception among some scholars of Spanish literature, culture, and linguistics that their colleagues in Spanish LSP are vocationally oriented and intellectually soft with a limited research agenda may introduce professional bias and undermine prestige. The clearest indicator of this trend is the overwhelming number of LSP practitioners who are contract faculty members without permanent status within the department—for example, parttime instructors, adjunct faculty, and graduate student instructors (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014). Although it is difficult to pinpoint whether such resistance by core tenured faculty to LSP is simply a tactic of self-preservation and professional survival or truly a manifestation of deep disciplinary hubris and intellectual elitism, it presents a formidable stumbling block to the progress of Spanish LSP programs, their instructors, and their instructors’ careers. Curriculum designers thus must confront this uncomfortable question: Are faculty members’ professional aspirations and intellectual inclinations driving postsecondary Spanish curricula or learners’ educational and professional needs?
In an explicit recognition of this uphill battle to garner intellectual and institutional respect for business LSP, Doyle (2012, 105) has argued quite compellingly for the need for “a more rigorous toponymic identity by which to identify itself as a theory-based field of scholarship.” As is the case in many fields, proper nomenclature and theoretical discourse represent the first steps toward disciplinary respect from outsiders. As such, he proposes that the official name of business LSP be “Business Language Studies.” As Doyle (2010, 2013, 2014) delineates the linguistic and cultural complexities of the field of business language studies and Spanish LSP more broadly, it becomes apparent that the quest for prestige and validation for the LSP profession and LSP professionals transcends simple semantics or a turn of phrase, and must be rooted in substantive and rigorous inquiry into the interface between language, culture, and content.
The “Spanish for Specific Purposes” section of our survey had six questions, with the option to manually write in a seventh. These items included the following issues, which are presented below in order from the one of most concern to the least, with mean scores at the end of each item, on a scale of 1 (very much a concern) to 5 (not a concern at all). We also include the overall rank of the item’s mean across all fifty-five survey items with regard to the level of perceived concern. The percentage of respondents who chose the sixth response option, “not applicable to my program,” appears last among the information at the end of each item:
Although the differences between the mean values for items related to Spanish for specific purposes are not large, all but one of the items scored below a 3, or neutral. That is to say that, on average, for approximately seven hundred instructors, the level of concern for five of the six issues lay somewhere between somewhat of a concern and neutral. The issue of most concern points to the difficulty of knowing how much to focus on language, disciplinary content, or cultural content, while the two items that generated the least amount of concern in this category have to do with personnel issues. Though the survey is clearly quite general and does not allow for detailed analyses of why the survey participants responded as they did, it does help to compare the tendencies in how subgroups ranked different categories’ items. For example, when participants’ responses to the six Spanish LSP questions were analyzed by academic rank (tenured / tenure track and nontenure track) the overall mean from Spanish LSP varied little, with a difference of 0.02 on a 5-point scale (2.74 = tenured; nontenured = 2.72). However, those trained in literary and cultural studies (2.55) appeared a bit more concerned about issues related to Spanish LSP as compared with their counterparts in linguistics and applied linguistics (2.93), where the lower the value indicates more concern.
Somewhat ironically, the most telling result of this national survey that reflects directly on the field of Spanish LSP came from an item not included in the Spanish LSP category. Under the other category, we asked that respondents indicate how much of a concern it was for their program to help “students value learning Spanish for reasons other than employment.” Of the fifty-five items for which mean values were calculated and for which the lower the score the greater the concern, this item had the lowest mean response and was the item of most concern. Once again, the survey was not designed to delve into the rationale behind each concern or what served as the basis for the concern for each individual; it simply asked participants for their perceptions “of the most pressing programmatic and curricular issues in Spanish education at your institution overall.” Evidently, this sample of approximately seven hundred postsecondary Spanish educators consider it somewhat worrisome that students might only want to learn Spanish to further their employment prospects and not for other reasons. Further research is needed to more clearly elucidate what lies at the root of this concern, and what has brought it to the fore for these instructors.
Targeted, discipline-specific learning of Spanish in the United States postsecondary context seems to make intuitive sense: maximize students’ time by focusing on the linguistic structures and lexical items that provide access to the topical content. However, as this chapter has shown, intuition and logic may not be enough to seamlessly incorporate Spanish LSP into collegiate Spanish programs and curricula. The initial surge of Spanish LSP courses and programs into traditional curricular structures and strictures may have subsided due to incoherent integration into existing curricula and programs of study, unclear connections between course content and subsequent student use of Spanish LSP, and significant pushback from the professoriate, or all three. Several scholars have noted that Spanish LSP lends itself particularly well to service learning (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014; Lear 2012; Sánchez-López 2014, 163), with Sánchez López calling it “worrisome” that service learning might not be included in programs on Spanish for specific purposes. Spanish LSP course instructors should take advantage of the widespread use of Spanish and the presence of Spanish-dominant speakers outside the language classroom by integrating greater service-learning opportunities into their course syllabus. Nevertheless, the instructors who responded to our survey appear to be anxious that students not only engage with Spanish for strictly utilitarian or professional motives but also for something more intellectually oriented. This apparent ambivalence toward the place of Spanish LSP among core faculty members may reflect the narrow and uninformed perspective that many Spanish instructors of all backgrounds have on the field of Spanish LSP. To the extent possible, it may be time to make the necessary adjustments in Spanish departments and programs to round off the edges of the Spanish LSP square peg (Lafford, Abbott, and Lear 2014) to fit the round hole of traditional Spanish curricula or to cut out edges in the round hole of these curricula to fit the square peg of Spanish LSP.
1. What characteristics of community service learning make it such a good fit for LSP courses? Are there other pedagogic techniques that might lend themselves better to an LSP course than a traditional language course? Why, and how so?
2. In your opinion, how important are the economic and professional benefits of foreign language study as compared with cognitive and interpersonal benefits? What about Spanish language majors and minors at your institution? How does this compare with other foreign language majors, such as French, German, and Chinese?
3. Early in the chapter, we stated that LSP courses represented “the embodiment of the conflicted nature of contemporary collegiate FL curricula.” Explain the nature of this conflict and to what extent it has manifested itself in your program.
4. Which LSP courses are offered at your institution, and which ones do you feel should be added, if any? Does your institution offer a specific certificate or emphasis in any area of Spanish LSP, and if not, should it?
5. How would you characterize the linguistic and cultural needs of Spanish LSP students at your institution who enroll in business Spanish, medical Spanish, translation, and the like? How do the majority of students use the knowledge acquired in those classes outside class or after graduation?
6. Taylor (1994) and Troike (1994) offer somewhat opposing perspectives on the effectiveness of a content specialist as an LSP instructor as compared with a language specialist. Which type of instructor would be more effective in your mind, a content specialist with superficial language training or a language specialist with only basic knowledge of the content area?
7. In the chapter, we cited instances in which an imbalance of power seemed to be implied in LSP teaching and learning, but differentially for students of English for specific purposes and of Spanish LSP. Explain how the status of English as a lingua franca and the pervasiveness of US culture internationally can serve to empower Spanish LSP students.
8. What can be done to imbue LSP courses, instructors, and research with greater intellectual and disciplinary prestige among professors of literature, culture, and linguistics, or even applied linguistics? How will this affect Spanish programs, their curricula, and their programs overall?
9. Our survey research does not identify why the respondents chose the responses they did. For example, the individual respondent may not have any problem with LSP courses but may perceive that his or her colleagues do, or the administration. As you look over the results from our survey, discuss potential reasons why participants might have responded the way they did.
1. For an undergraduate business Spanish course, assign students to design and administer a short survey to businesses, nonprofits, or organizations from different sectors of the local economy to discover (1) how often Spanish is used by their employees or volunteers to conduct business, and (2) the nature of the Spanish that is used (e.g., conversational Spanish, formal written Spanish). Compare the responses from at least three different organizations, and then analyze how these compare with at least one business Spanish textbook. In what ways do the survey results correspond to the language and language skills covered in the textbook?
2. For a medical Spanish or translation course, have students contact a local hospital or health clinic and inquire about the hiring process for paid and volunteer medical interpreters and the minimum qualifications required (e.g., required certifications, proficiency minimums). Also inquire about the nature of the tasks they are asked to complete (e.g., assisting with intake forms, interpreting for receptionists, nurses, and physicians). Finally, find out the particulars of the position, such as hours per week, benefits, whether it is part time or full time, and so on.
3. For a translation course, ask students to collect three or four sample tests from large organizations like the American Translator’s Association or the Federal Court Interpreter’s Program or from smaller regional organizations and translation houses. After students have collected the tests, ask them to analyze the nature of the language tested as well as the characteristics of the test tasks. Have them reflect on what level of overall proficiency would be needed to complete the various tasks for each assessment instrument.
1. We use “Spanish LSP” deliberately, rather than “Spanish SP” or “SPP,” given the familiarity with and widespread use of the acronym “LSP” in the literature, and to clearly differentiate it from the commonly used acronym “ESP,” for English for specific purposes.
2. Original Spanish: “muy diferente al existente en épocas anteriores” (Puch 2004, 1149).
3. Original Spanish: “un interés por parte de las instituciones académicas y profesionales por canalizar esta demanda (universidades, Cámaras de Comercio e Industria, academias de idiomas, etc.) y el consiguiente inicio de la actividad editorial en este campo” (Beltrán 2004, 1113–14).
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