Vanessa Fonseca, now a graduate teaching assistant in the University of New Mexico’s Sabine Ulibarrí Spanish as a Heritage Language program, said it took her all of two minutes to figure out a non-heritage Spanish class she stumbled into as an undergraduate was not for her.
Reynaldo Pol, a coordinator of English as a second language courses for adults in a suburban Atlanta county, knows first-hand what issues language instructors in his corner of the world face. When he decided it was time to go back to school, Pol, a Cuban by birth who grew up in Puerto Rico and received his bachelor’s degree at Georgia’s Piedmont College, decided he wanted to look more broadly, beyond borders.
Foreign language study in the United States has had many a “Sputnik moment,” as H. Jay Siskin, a French instructor at Cabrillo College, in California, put it -- that is, a moment that reveals an economic or military weakness and has been used as a call to arms to strengthen, among other things, language education.
