Twenty-one countries, millions of native speakers, and one semester to teach it all: Linguistic variation in entry level college textbooks for Spanish

There is a great deal of linguistic variety in the Spanish that is spoken throughout the world. Differences such as the use of the voseo, the seseo, and the subject pronoun vosotros, are regularly employed in some areas, while other people groups express themselves in a totally different manner. Because such a wide range of linguistic nuances exist, textbook authors are faced with the difficult task of choosing which elements to include and which to exclude from their writing. This study examines 17 different beginning level textbooks for college students of Spanish with a particular focus on the teaching of the following elements: forms of address, pronunciation of the language, and grammatical structures including direct object pronouns and possessive adjectives. The research showed that while some texts attempt to include linguistic variety, most tend to favor a more Castilian Spanish for forms of address, but yet a somewhat neutralized grammatical form and pronunciation of the Spanish language.