A Comparison of the Monostructural and Dialogue Approaches to the Teaching of College Spanish

Conceptualizing Language Learners: Socioinstitutional Mechanisms and their Consequences

“…Articles in this decade continued to describe students generally or by their membership in a particular grade/year/course, either in traditional primary, secondary, and tertiary school settings, voluntary language schools (Ehrmann, ), or bilingual programs for Spanish‐speaking students in the United States (Saavedra, ), without mention of placement mechanisms or definitions of proficiency levels. Language aptitude continued to be a sorting mechanism both for empirical study (Blickenstaff & Woerdehoff, ) and for course placement (Hansen, ; Johnson, Flores, & Ellison, ), with explicit mentions of both the Modern Language Aptitude Test and the more recently developed Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (Pimsleur & Struth, ). And while there was no mention of student outcomes determining progress from one course to the next, there was empirical interest in measuring the impact of pedagogical practices on course grades (Politzer, ), standardized language assessments, like the MLA Cooperative Spanish Test (Blickenstaff & Woerdehoff, ), and sometimes also teacher ranking (Payne & Vaughn, ).…”