A content-based approach to spanish language study: Foreign languages across the curriculum

Beginning in the 1980s with efforts to internationalize North American universities, a new initiative, Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum (FLAC) (later termed Languages Across the Curriculum, or LAC), gained momentum. FLAC courses were developed at a variety of postsecondary institutions with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), the Center for International Education at the Department of Education, and several private foundations, such as the American Council on Education (ACE). The primary purpose of these programs is to provide opportunities to students who have already achieved a minimum proficiency in a foreign language to use their language skills in selected courses outside language and literature departments. The rationale for FLAC, as stated by the Consortium for Language Across the Curriculum (1996), is as follows: 1. Understanding of a given culture and its documents and artifacts is greatly enhanced through a knowledge of its language. 2. A curriculum that includes materials in multiple languages provides access to a wider range of perspectives, encourages greater depth of exploration, and opens the door to greater understanding. 3. The use of materials in multiple languages significantly enhances any and all disciplinary inquiry. 4. Languages Across the Curriculum enhances cross-cultural competence and the ability of students to function in an increasingly multicultural society and a globalized economy.