I am taking the readings and marking them up in red — a sentence in English to summarize the point of each paragraph. I am also hyperlinking the references to famous people and events the students will not have heard of to definitions and encyclopedia entries. I am PDFing these documents and loading them up to Moodle.
I am doing this because the students do not know enough Spanish to actually read these documents. I am giving readings also given in parallel courses at Ivy and Big Ten schools, but not as challenging as those the Spanish Professor is giving at her SLAC (where her colleague teaches even harder things). My colleague taught a senior literature survey with a book like this because of the language problem.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I am commenting way late, but in the same way that extensive preparation saves teaching work, especially in language classes, if you were able to take over the lower division classes (as much as you might dislike it) you would not have to do this work.
It might be improving on its own. My 4th semester class right now is the best I have ever had here. The issue besides the language is that I am not giving readings for them just to memorize — reading for analysis is apparently not what all faculty in all disciplines have people do …