On December 8, 2017, SPO lecturers, Catalina Mendez Vallejo, Paloma Moscardo, Anais Holgado, Nadia Cervantes, and Andie Faber presented a talk at Instituto Cervantes, New York, at a conference for Spanish language educators titled, “El futuro de la enseñanza del español en EE.UU.” (The future of Spanish teaching in the United States).

In the talk, the presenters discussed some of the challenges to teaching Spanish in the US, including attitudes toward the language, diversity in language learners’ abilities, and linguistic variation among bilingual speakers. They stressed that Spanish in the United States is not a foreign language, but rather a local one. In fact, estimates from the US Census Bureau put the Latino population of New Jersey at approximately 19% of the total population. For that reason, these Princeton instructors stress the importance of forming ties with the Latino community in their courses. In their talk at Instituto Cervantes, they proposed several approaches currently used in Princeton language classrooms that take advantage of the bilingual situation in New Jersey to connect students to authentic contexts of language use.

In addition to the presenters, numerous SPO lecturers were in attendance participating in these important discussions.