The Articulation of High-School and College Spanish

Articulation as used in this paper means integration.* A surprisingly large number of high-school transfers have been unable to do successfully the work required in their first college course, and the integration of the high-schoolcollege Spanish sequence is therefore of vital concern to both the high-school and the college teacher. Although some colleges have made changes in their curriculum in order to improve this relationship, a few to the extent of offering courses especially designed for high-school transfers, the tendency to blame the highschool teacher for the existing faulty articulation has been far too prevalent. She is accused of being inadequately prepared to teach her subject, lazy, lacking in enthusiasm for her work, and satisfied with mediocre results from her students. I want to examine briefly some of the problems involved in the high-schoolcollege sequence with the hope of stimulating the thinking of both the colleges and the high schools on this issue. Some of the facts and figures included have been compiled from questionnaires answered by twenty-five college and university Spanish teachers. How do the high-school transfer students fare in their first college courses? Our questionnaire shows that only about 50 % are able to do satisfactory work in conversation courses while about 70

Articulation (sociology) · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Sociology · Higher Education Teaching and Evaluation · Literacy and Educational Practices · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies