This course provides graduate students with an opportunity to explore main issues and theories in  the field of heritage languages from different perspectives and prepare them to conduct research in this field. Some of the topics included in the course include: heritage language populations and communities, language policies and ideologies, heritage language competence and development, and heritage language pedagogues. Emphasis will be placed on Spanish as a heritage language in the United States but other heritage languages will also be covered.

This course continues the study of the generative analysis of the phonological system of Spanish started in Spanish phonology I. SPAN 580 (Spanish Phonology II) reviews recent analyses of important phonological processes of Spanish, highlighting advances, difficulties and unresolved theoretical and empirical issues. The course aims to provide students with: (a) the knowledge and resources necessary to read and critique/analyze generative analyses of the phonological system of Spanish; (b) a general understanding of major theoretical models of phonology through their application to Spanish; (c) a general understanding of the challenges presented by Spanish to modern linguistic analysis, as well as the ability to formulate research questions. Students who wish to enroll in the course are required to have a sound knowledge of the descriptive facts of the phonology of Spanish and of major concepts/tools of generative phonology.

The goal of this course is to systematically examine methods, approaches, techniques and activities for the teaching of foreign languages and its use in the classroom. It will include an overview of learner strategies and cooperative learning, the use and adaptation of textbooks, and some of the journals available in the field. Participants will be introduced to second language acquisition theories, course design, lesson planning and testing, and have experience creating a cohesive instructional unit.

This course involves an examination of the methods and argumentation used in syntactic analysis, both from a general point of view and from the perspective of generative grammar. Emphasis is placed on analyzing language data, on constructing and evaluating syntactic argumentation, and on understanding the Principles & Parameters approach to the study of sentence structure. Secondarily, this course is also an introduction to scientific theorizing: what it means to construct a scientific theory, how to test a scientific theory, how to choose among competing theories. Linguistic data will be drawn from Spanish.