Why, When and How to Infuse Career Education into the Curriculum.

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The reactions of many teachers to the suggestion that they infuse career education into their classes range from “That doesn’t belong in a language classroom” and “There isn’t enough time!” to “But I don’t know enough about it to teach it!” To the first statement, my answer is that career education belongs in every classroom from pre-kindergarten through graduate school. The speaking, reading and writing skills that are taught in all subject areas are important in most occupations. Students may be more willing to learn them if they are shown how important these skills will be in helping them find a job that will allow them to reach their full potential. Attitudes that make a person more employable, such as getting along with others, a sense of responsibility, perserverance, and punctuality, need to be instilled from the earliest grades, not only for future job success, but for success throughout school as well. With regard to time, there are several ways of fitting in career education without neglecting the regular syllabus. Comb your textbooks for references to occupations-virtually all will deal with travel in some form, health, banking, restaurants, and services of some type. A few pertinent questions in Spanish relating to employment in those fields will add to your students’ career awareness. There are some excellent career books in Spanish suitable for the secondary level. These can be used in a special career or conversation course, or sections from them can be incorporated into the regular curriculum as reading and conversation topics. Both of the following could be used on the intermediate or advanced level. Sedwick’s Spanish for Careers’ consists of 25 lessons, each dealing with a different occupation. Each lesson contains a detailed drawing, a dialogue, questions on the dialogue and drawing, more thought-provoking questions, topics for discussion or composition, a translation passage from English to Spanish, and a vocabulary list. Another source for career activities is Spanish for the Professions, 2 a workbook dealing intensively with five areas: Health Care, Law Enforcement, Education, Welfare, and Business. Each is divided into many sections, enabling you to use as few or as many as you prefer. Also included are a preliminary chapter with basic material, several appendices, and a Spanish-English vocabulary. The day before a holiday, when students are too restless to do regular work, is an ideal ti e to discuss careers requiring a primary or s condary knowledge of a foreign language. The best source of information in this area is Bourgoin’s Foreign Languages and Your Career3 This book provides teachers with the necessary background to guide their students in choosing possible careers. It includes many addresses for obtaining further information and is an excellent resource for a class project in which students read individual chapters, write to the sources for further information, and then report to the class. Other sources are all around us. Newspapers frequently have articles on careers. The New York Times publishes an entire section on careers in mid-October of each year, as does the National Business Employment Weekly, put out by the Wall Street Journal every fall. The quarterly Business Week’s Guide to Careers4 aims at college students, but many of its articles are helpful to secondary students, and their teachers, as well. This very practical magazine can guide them in choosing a major and a minor in college, and show them how to prepare themselves for an eventual job search. The public libraries are filled with books about every aspect of the job search-how to dress, write a resume, undergo an interview, learn about a firm before the interview, and much more. These matters may not directly fall under language skills; however, they can provide relevancy to language learning as the teacher who is familiar with these materials works them into the curriculum via ques-