Spanish for animal health and care: towards a certificate program in field-specific Spanish

Abstract Text:

There is increasing awareness of the need for basic field-specific communication skills in Spanish on the part of animal science and veterinary professionals working with livestock operations. Between 80% and 90% of the workforce in such establishments is comprised of Spanish-speaking immigrants with low English proficiency and minimal formal education. Until now, the ways in which this language barrier has been approached have not been informed by the growing body of research on Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP). The objective of this presentation is to detail the interdisciplinary approach to the curriculum development and implementation of a basic “Spanish for Animal Health and Care” class leading to a certificate program designed to cater to the specific language needs of future animal scientists and veterinarians. The curriculum is based on a needs analysis, which includes non-structured interviews of Spanish-speaking workers on livestock farms and livestock farm professionals, the recording of a livestock workers’ safety meeting, as well as the creation of a specialized, domain-specific corpus. All course materials consist of module-specific packages of video and audio recordings, interactive hands-on materials, a library of relevant images, and a corpus of authentic texts, from which targeted vocabulary and grammatical forms are derived. The curriculum is divided into 3 performance-based units: describing and comparing animals’ physical and behavioral traits, mock-trainings of new hires wherein students describe the ‘why’ of farm procedures, and a mock-veterinary consultation which includes descriptions of abnormal animal behavior/physicality and recommendations for care. Formal mid-term assessments demonstrate increased development of functional language proficiency by indicating ascension on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) proficiency scale from novice-mid towards novice-high. Communicative tasks that form the performance-based assessments require elaborated, context-specific sentence-length discourse, which is imperative for novice-high proficiency on the ACTFL scale. Informal student evaluations report gratitude and excitement about working towards field-specific functional proficiency in Spanish, which may factor into the current class average of 87.48%. Additionally, a survey completed by 257 students in CSU’s professional veterinary program revealed that 93.5% of students are interested in learning basic Spanish language skills specific to their future professional needs. 92.8% of those surveyed and 100% of students currently taking the beginner Spanish course report that they would like to pursue a certificate program in Spanish for Animal Health and Care.

Keywords: curriculum development, languages for specific purposes, spanish language proficiency