MIAMI -- The International Actor Formation Center Luz Columba is not your ordinary acting school. It grooms aspiring actors specifically for soap operas, and it trains them in Spanish no less.

The school's mere existence underscores a recent boom in U.S.-made Spanish-language soap operas -- or telenovelas -- as producers and advertisers seek to tap into the more than $6 billion in purchasing power of the nation's growing Hispanic market.

Besides the acting school, a program for Spanish-language soap writers opened last year in Miami and received 4,000 applications for its first semester. Telenovelas, which are broadcast in the U.S. on TV networks geared toward Hispanics, are even being adapted for general American audiences.

Spanish-language soap operas, which generally follow a sexy heroine who rises from poverty to find love and fortune, have long been popular around the world and are dubbed into languages including Hebrew and Japanese. The melodramas are three- to six-months long -- unlike the continuously evolving American soap.

And until recently, they focused on the Latin American experience.

Now, as producers seek to attract a U.S. audience, they are not only beginning to film in the United States, but they are looking for themes that the country's estimated 40 million Hispanics can relate to.

"When you leave your country, you have a different set of issues, a different set of needs. We thought, 'Why not produce our own stories that address our own issues?"' said Mimi Belt, the Miami-based vice president of artistic development for the NBC Universal-owned Telemundo cable network.

Telenovela star Eric Elias, who emigrated from Mexico, says the fact that so many actors in these shows are immigrants helps them better relate to fans in the United States.

"We go out to meet fans," Elias said, "and there is a bond because we are all in the same boat."

Producing shows for U.S.-based audiences has meant updating the standard Cinderella tale. In 2003, "Betty the Ugly," became a hit in the United States with its unusual tale of a smart but frumpy office drone, hopelessly in love with her boss, who eventually takes over her company, gets a makeover -- and of course finds romances and riches.

That show proved so popular that ABC and Salma Hayek are working on an English-language version of the program. Los Angeles-based Twentieth Television, the company behind "24" and a major producer of TV programming, also is working on remaking several telenovelas in English.

The upsurge is due in large part to Telemundo's decision in 2003 to produce telenovelas in the United States to better compete with Spanish-language powerhouse Univision Communications Inc., which has long dominated the U.S. Hispanic television market with its mostly Mexican-made imports.

Telemundo now produces nearly 10 shows a year in its Miami studios and has produced at least one in Texas.

As the genre's popularity in the United States grows, the acting style is also beginning to change.

Acting teacher Aquiles Ortega, who taught at Luz Columba's original campus in Venezuela before teaching in Miami, says his goal is to impart a more natural form of acting -- instead of the gasping, eyebrow-arching melodrama that characterizes many of the soaps.

"What we are trying to do is to make it more spontaneous and free, so the audience can truly believe in what it's seeing," he said.

Since the school opened last year, Ortega said he has been asked to send students to nearly a dozen castings.