Spanish for Business: The creation of New Majors to Keep the Language Teaching Profession Alive where Traditional Learning is no Longer Sought

• In Event: From Theory to Practice: The Teaching of Spanish for Specific Purposes

Abstract

In order to respond to students' new learning trends and needs, institutions, departments of languages, and college/university faculty are finding it necessary to create new programs to satisfy the needs of a new generation of students who are not only technology savvy and demand more online courses, but also expect that their language learning be geared to specific professionals applications such as business and finance. Taking into account what has been delineated in LASA 2015 Call for Papers, “[new] technologies have become central to linguistic, cultural, social, political, and economic subjects as tools to challenge existing exclusions, exercise new horizons of knowledge, and forge creative forms of emergence, visibility, and empowerment,” and having recourse on some pertinent both first and second language teaching and learning research—including research on the implications of new technologies in language teaching/learning—we will show how, at Northern Arizona University at Yuma, faculty had to overcome all sort of challenges from traditional perspectives to create and implement a new minor in Spanish for Specific Purposes (Business, in this case). Also, the advantages and disadvantages of offering it completely online will be discussed.

Author

• Amalia V Garzón, Northern Arizona University