The Art of Teaching Spanish explores in-depth the findings of research in second language acquisition (SLA) and other language-related fields and translates those findings into practical pedagogical tools for current—and future—Spanish-language instructors. This volume addresses how theoretical frameworks affect the application of research findings to the teaching of Spanish, how logistical factors affect the way research findings can be applied to teach Spanish, and how findings from Spanish SLA research would be applicable to Spanish second language teaching and represented in Spanish curricula through objectives and goals (as evidenced in pedagogical materials such as textbooks and computer-assisted language learning software).

Top SLA researchers and applied linguists lend their expertise on matters such as foreign language across curriculum programs, testing, online learning, the incorporation of linguistic variation into the classroom, heritage language learners, the teaching of translation, the effects of study abroad and classroom contexts on learning, and other pedagogical issues. Other common themes of The Art of Teaching Spanish include the rejection of the concept of a monolithic language competence, the importance of language as social practice and cultural competence, the psycholinguistic component of SLA, and the need for more cross-fertilization from related fields.

This book offers concrete and practical ideas for implementing content-based instruction—using subject matter rather than grammar—through eleven case studies of cutting-edge models in a broad variety of languages, academic settings, and levels of proficiency.

The highly innovative models illustrate content-based instruction programs for both commonly and less-commonly taught languages—Arabic, Croatian, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish—and for proficiency levels ranging from beginners to fluent speakers. They include single-teacher and multi-teacher contexts and such settings as typical language department classrooms, specialty schools, intensive language programs, and university programs in foreign languages across the curriculum.

All of the contributors are pioneers and practitioners of content-based instruction, and the methods they present are based on actual classroom experiences. Each describes the rationale, curriculum design, materials, and evaluation procedures used in an actual curriculum and discusses the implications of the approach for adult language acquisition.

El español en contacto con otras lenguas is the first comprehensive historical, social, and linguistic overview of Spanish in contact with other languages in all of its major contexts—in Spain, the United States, and Latin America. In this significant contribution to the field of Hispanic linguistics, Carol A. Klee and Andrew Lynch explore the historical and social factors that have shaped contact varieties of the Spanish language, synthesizing the principle arguments and theories about language contact, and examining linguistic changes in Spanish phonology, morphology and syntax, and pragmatics.

Individual chapters analyze particular contact situations: in Spain, contact with Basque, Catalan, Valencian, and Galician; in Mexico, Central, and South America, contact with Nahuatl, Maya, Quechua, Aimara, and Guarani; in the Southern Cone, contact with other principle European languages such as Portuguese, Italian, English, German, and Danish; in the United States, contact with English. A separate chapter explores issues of creolization in the Philippines and the Americas and highlights the historical influence of African languages on Spanish, primarily in the Caribbean and Equatorial Guinea.

Written in Spanish, this detailed synthesis of wide-ranging research will be a valuable resource for scholars of Hispanic linguistics, language contact, and sociolinguistics.

This collection is the first to examine the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the development of dialectal varieties of Spanish in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Nineteen essays investigate a variety of complex situations of contact between Spanish and typologically different languages, including Basque, Bantu languages, English, and Quechua. The overall picture that evolves clearly indicates that although influence from the contact languages may lead to different dialects, the core grammar of Spanish remains intact.

Silva-Corvalán's volume makes an important contribution both to sociolinguistics in general, and to Spanish linguistics in particular. The contributors address theoretical and empirical issues that advance our knowledge of what is a possible linguistic change, how languages change, and how changes spread in society in situations of intensive bilingualism and language contact, a situation that appears to be the norm rather than the exception in the world.