Spanish for the Professions is not a new field at all, but, we feel, it has got relevance in the past few decades, particularly in the USA. According to Maria Florencia Tebano Basaluzzo (University of Pennsylvania): “over the past decades, the major changing conditions in which professions perform have led institutions and universities to review their strategies in terms of language teaching. As far as Spanish instruction is concerned, ever-growing regional integration of the United States and Latin America (with Mexico in particular), and the considerable increase in the number of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States has put forth the need to train professionals to perform their tasks entirely in a second language. This trend has resulted in a growing demand by the student population to obtain language instruction oriented to meet their specific professional needs, transforming the importance ascribed to foreign language into a key tool to access a much more competitive global market”.
As a result of this process, the supply of Spanish courses for professional purposes is currently divided into two major segments.
The first one is oriented towards teaching Spanish for the Professions in a general way, and this segment addresses several professional fields in the same course, providing a broader and more general perspective of each field. These tend to be the majority of courses given at universities. And while this is a very good option, it does not meet the needs of those who have already chosen their major, and need something more specialized and in-depth. In addition, this approach poses a number of challenges: the possibility of not assigning sufficient depth to the content to ensure its usefulness for the student’s future, and the inability to achieve a maximum degree of cohesion and connection between topics, as it is aimed at a heterogeneous student population with diverse interests and aspirations. Our school is not in this first approach.
The second approach, our school approach to Spanish for the Professionas courses, is very much oriented towards specialized and comprehensive education in highly demanded professional fields, such as medicine and health, law and business. Courses in this segment have the advantages of all tailor-made courses even if they are not tailor-made: relative ease in defining objectives and design, the possibility of covering different and varied topics in the same field of specialization as well as exhaustive content coverage, and the fact that they are aimed at a student population that is homogeneous in interests and highly motivated to learn. Therefore, these courses may not be suitable for the risk of lacking usefulness for students who have not yet chosen any specialty or those who want something more generalist that covers several aspects, such as a hospital manager who touches on business and medicine but does not delve deeply into any of them.
But beyond that, we should keep in mind that it is not only a question of specialization and vocabulary or content, but it affects grammar and how we express ourselves and in what context. The well-known pragmatics of language. To set an example, if a person is selling in a commercial negotiation and wants to know to what extent the negotiation has gone well, and the buyer says: “te llamo en una semana y lo cerramos” (which is told in the present tense) it is very different from if the buyer says “te llamaré en una semana y lo cerraremos”. In Spanish you can use the present tense for a near future action and, in addition, the present tense in that situation gives a much greater degree of certainty than the use of the future, so that if the buyer uses the present tense he will give the clues to the seller that the negotiation is almost closed, while if he uses the future, either the buyer is not interested in the negotiation or in the following week he will ask for many more things to close it. And this use of the future and the present differs to other language.
If you want to know many more things about Spanish for the Professions, join us in our Spanish Immersion Expeditions,
https://celticspainschool.com/standard-and-spanish-for-the-professions-courses/
We recommend you this article:
Spanish in the professions and in the community in the US | Request PDF (researchgate.net)