Teaching World Languages for Specific Purposes: A Practical Guide by Diana M. Ruggiero

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching World Languages for Specific Purposes: A Practical Guide by Diana M. Ruggiero Darcy Lear Ruggiero, Diana M. Teaching World Languages for Specific Purposes: A Practical Guide. Georgetown U P, 2022. Pp. 136. ISBN 978-1-64712-159-4. Teaching World Languages for Specific Purposes: A Practical Guide (2022) by Diana M. Ruggiero provides an overview of World Languages for Specific Purposes (WLSP) along with practical tips that serve language educators interested in venturing into the realm of WLSP. It is an excellent primer for those new to the field and for all practitioners, it provides a thorough definition and discussion of WLSP, its history, and its value within higher education, all in one place and for the first time. The volume is full of “Yes, you can!” encouragement for the WLSP curious and is buttressed by the same empathy, compassion, mindfulness, and love it calls for among educators. It includes a call to engage with the field—and for universities to support it with graduate level programming—while it also situates WLSP within the contexts of the higher education and humanities landscapes. Innovative contributions to the field appear throughout the guide, such as calls for mindfulness and repeated emphasis on attention to nonverbal communication as we work to equip students with the skills they will need beyond the classroom and academy. It asserts that WLSP practitioners are language educators—experts—who can indeed teach languages for specific purposes, even if we have to engage with a learning curve that anything new requires or occasionally assume the role of “client” or “patient” who obviously has limited to no expertise in the specific-purpose domain. The book can be read straight through or used as a reference—if you are interested in integrating WLSP into non-WLSP courses, skip to chapter 7; interpreting, skip to chapter 8. Integrating [End Page 163] culture is the theme of chapter 9, and it includes specific details on how to integrate a song into a medical Spanish course and a presentation of the very useful model that is World Café. The guide repeatedly promises strategies, materials, and resources for developing lessons and courses and where they are delivered, they are excellent. For example, community service learning is covered in chapters 5 and 6, and there you will find good practical suggestions and specific examples to get started as well as repeated emphasis on the importance of mutually beneficial relationship between the university and the community with sustainable projects and partnerships. Elsewhere, however, the indexing seems circular; abundant promises that specifics will appear in later chapters (or have already appeared in earlier chapters) make it nearly impossible to track whether or not all that is promised is delivered. “The appendix” and occasionally “the final chapter” get frequent mentions when in fact there are 10 appendices labeled A-J and it would be nice to have them specifically referred to with clear indexing throughout the guide. That lack of clarity meant that sometimes where I tried to follow a thread, it led to a dead end; for example, I could not find the service-learning journal assignments that were promised in chapter 6 in any of the appendices. The book concludes with a compelling call for graduate level WLSP programming, a plea that bears repeating when university language departments train PhD students almost exclusively in literary studies with some acceptance of linguistics, while WLSP remains solidly positioned outside of all of that. Job ads in higher education, however, increasingly seek candidates to fill some level of WLSP role; how can those experts exist when PhD programs continue to exclusively train PhD students in the core content of literary studies and some linguistics? Throughout, this book unapologetically asserts that a both/and solution wherein critical, culture-centered traditional humanities and WLSP will necessarily co-exist is required. It is a future I look forward to and hope to embrace with all the optimism and enthusiasm packed into this volume. Darcy Lear University of Chicago Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Inc