A new Spanish minor will be offered at ASU’s Downtown campus this fall that will have a professional focus as opposed to a traditional emphasis on linguistics.
Unlike the current Spanish minor that is offered at the Tempe campus that consists of literature and linguistics courses, the downtown minor will “focus on how Spanish is used in professional fields,” said Carmen King, a Downtown campus professor who will be teaching several courses for the new program.
“Our goal with this minor is to produce students who are linguistically and culturally competent, so that they are better able to deal with the Spanish speakers in the area,” King said.
While King likes the current literature-based Spanish minor, she said that the new minor needed to be created in order to provide for the wants of students.
The curriculum is intentionally geared toward the needs of students who have majors at the Downtown campus — journalism, nursing, social work, education and criminal justice students will benefit especially, King said, because of the social nature of their ensuing careers.
Hector Hernandez, a criminal justice sophomore, said the new minor is a great idea for the Downtown campus. Hernandez, who comes from a Spanish-speaking household in Golden Grove, Calif., near Los Angeles, said it’s difficult for him to keep his Spanish sharp while he’s at ASU because he never gets the opportunity to speak it.
“I find that when I do get to speak (Spanish), sometimes I have to ask how to say certain words in Spanish because I haven’t spoken it in so long,” he said.
King said the new Spanish minor is more practical than the Tempe program and will be a good networking experience.
“The Tempe Spanish minor is great if you want to end up teaching, or going to grad school, or if you want to write a book,” King said. “We’ve found that only about eight percent of students (in the Tempe minor) are actually interested in doing that.”
King said that the internship opportunities that come with taking the minor are appealing to students.
“At this point in time, we’ve talked to people at Telemundo, St. Vincent de Paul Health Clinic, Parenting Arizona, Chicanos Por La Causa, and the City of Phoenix about internships,” she said.
King said that the Hispanic community in Phoenix, especially those who can’t speak English very well or are illegal immigrants, feel disconnected from society to some extent, which could be minimized if students in majors like criminal justice and nursing had a better understanding of Hispanic culture.
“There is a fear among many illegal immigrants that if they call the police for something they will be arrested,” she said. “Many hospital workers need to take Hispanic diseases into account. These are the types of things that we are trying to do with this minor.”
Rebecca Herrera, a social work junior, said that a certain stigma exists that keep Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speakers from working together as well as they could.
“Whenever I go into a Spanish-speaking business everything’s normal, because I speak Spanish,” she said. “But when (people who don’t speak Spanish) show up there’s kind of like this thing. It’s like ‘who are these people? Are they with the sheriff’s office?’”
The minor curriculum consists of six 3-hour courses, including an internship, which vary from oral and written language skill development to Latino perspectives and culture.
Students interested in the minor must have completed SPA 313 and 314 or must be able to use Spanish in a “conversational” manner, King said.
“Everything in the curriculum is taught and written in Spanish,” she said.
She said that student response to the announcement to the new minor has been good and if a student is interested in taking one or more courses in the fall it’s important to sign up soon.
“We are capping each class at 20 students, so we can only accept 80 unique students, provided there are no students who take more than one of the courses in the same semester,” she said.
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