Spanish Across The Curriculum
Department of Foreign Language and Literature University of Central Florida
Faculty
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Goals
Spanish Across the Curriculum is an academic program designed to increase the practical use of Spanish. This is accomplished through the use of the Spanish language in subject matters such as science, math, and social studies.
The long term goal of Spanish Across the Curriculum is to integrate Spanish into the teaching of all disciplines in order to enrichtheir intercultural and international content. This comes in response to global multiculturalism and the increasing internationalization of media and markets.
Rationale
1. Understanding of a given culture and its documents and artifacts is greatly enhanced through a knowledge of its language.
2. A curriculum that includes materials in multiple languages provides access to a wider range of perspectives, encourages greater depth of exploration, and opens the door to greater understanding.
3. The use of materials in multiple languages significantly enhances any and all disciplinary inquiry.
4. Spanish Across the Curriculum enhances cross-cultural competence and the ability of students to function in an increasingly multicultural society and a globalized economy.
Background
Unless they can major in language or area studies, college and university students lack curricular opportunities to develop foreign language competencies in their areas of academic interest . UCF’s Spanish Across the Curriculum program (SAC) addresses this problem by preparing Spanish language materials for use in courses that would not normally include such materials.
The primary premise of the SAC program is that written (as well as audio and video) materials in foreign languages can and should be used throughout the University and that the use of these materials should be linked to the subject-matter interests of the students.
Faculty with Spanish language proficiency offer SAC options in their courses to broaden and enliven course content by including Spanish language materials. Such materials, which are used in ten to twenty percent of the assignments in an SAC-supported course, provide intercultural perspectives on course content and foster language skills in SAC-participating students.
Participating students need have only intermediate reading proficiency in a foreign language in order to perform SAC assignments unassisted.
The long term goal of SAC is to establish a campus-wide expectation that students will make meaningful use of the foreign languages they know in any class at any level anywhere in the University curriculum.
Project directors : Dr. Jose Fernandez & Maria T. Redmon
For more information on this program contact:
Dr. Maria Redmon
HFA 512B
407-823-5738
redmon@pegasus.cc.ucf.edu
This website was produced by Michael Deliz for the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.