Sobre los desafíos y motivaciones de los estudiantes para aprender español con el currículo actual en universidades sudafricanas

María  Recuenco Peñalver; Arturo Mendoza Ramos

Authors

María Recuenco Peñalver University of Cape Town, South Africa
Arturo Mendoza Ramos University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

Keywords:

Spanish language, Higher education, South Africa, motivation, curriculum revision

Abstract

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken and learnt languages worldwide. Spanish teaching in Africa has been relevant in Francophone countries and the Magreb. In the Southern region of Africa, Madagascar and South Africa are the two countries with the higher number of learners. In South Africa, although students in higher education are motivated to learn Spanish, the implementation of language policies and the current Spanish language curriculum in South African universities have largely set back the number of enrolments in recent years. In this paper, we examine the current situation of Spanish studies in higher education institutions in South Africa, focusing on the cases of the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. We conducted a survey among 89 first, second and third-year students, who were learning Spanish at both universities in 2019 and 2020. The collected results suggest that Spanish is an important language to learn in South African universities, but its implementation at the tertiary level might benefit from some revision of the current Spanish language curriculum. Finally, we would argue that the design and implementation of language policies in higher education are negatively impacting the opportunities for students to learn Spanish.

Author Biographies

María Recuenco Peñalver, University of Cape Town, South Africa

PhD in translation and literature from the University of Malaga. She is a sworn translator for the Supreme Court of South Africa, Vice-President of the Association of Hispanists of Southern Africa, examiner for the Cervantes Institute, where she did a translation internship in the Spanish Translation Unit of the Secretariat General of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2005. She is a member of the advisory board of several research journals and her current lines of research focus on translation and interpreting, literary self-translation, post-colonial literature and the didactics of language and literature.

Arturo Mendoza Ramos, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

PhD. in Linguistics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Director of the Centre for Mexican Studies at UNAM in South Africa. He is also a visiting researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he also teaches Spanish courses within the Faculty of Literature, Languages and Media. He has been a member of the National System of Researchers since 2019. She has co-published four pedagogical books and numerous articles in national and international journals. She is a member of the Association of Hispanists of Southern Africa.