Using the National Standards' 5 C's as a framework, the authors examine student success in Spanish community service‐learning at making connections across academic disciplines, to information and viewpoints that they encounter in the community, and to concrete social action. We use data from students, instructors, and community partners involved in a community service‐learning Spanish course to present three cases: a student who made connections and took action, another who could not make connections beyond her own experience vis‐à‐vis the concept of poverty, and one representative case of a student who excelled as a student in every traditional context yet did not take action.

Community service learning (CSL) is a type of experiential learning that blends specific course content with real-world applications and ties them together through structured reflection. It is an ideal pedagogy for 21st-century language for specific purposes (LSP) programs. This article frames that argument around sociocultural theory, moves to a discussion of existing models, materials, and research, and describes the relevance of CSL and LSP to the contexts of higher education, communities beyond campus, and professional workplaces. Challenges to the implementation of CSL and LSP programs include resistance to interdisciplinary work, increasing dependence on income-generating models, and historical lack of campus-community engagement. The article concludes with a description of current needs and priorities, such as the development of models and standards for CSL and LSP, as well as an agenda for advancing the disciplines within institutions of higher education.

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As scholarly work has recently turned its attention to the role of the community partner in Community Service-Learning (CSL) relationships, empirical frameworks for describing and executing community partnerships have emerged. This article applies those frameworks to one such partnership, which is presented from the perspective of both the community partner and the faculty member. The article details the work of the community partner and faculty member (coauthors) to design and revise CSL projects for a total of seven teams of business Spanish students. These projects advanced the work of a community organization serving Hispanic microentrepreneurs in need of support to formalize and grow their businesses.