Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom by Judy Hochberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom by Judy Hochberg Carlos Benavides Hochberg, Judy. Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom. Routledge, 2021. Pp. 164. ISBN 978-0-367-11196-0. There is a scarcity of books in the market that incorporate topics in linguistics into the teaching of languages. Bringing Linguistics into the Spanish Language Classroom comes to fill this void. This book enables teachers to integrate the most interesting and important findings of Hispanic linguistics into their Spanish language classes. For each topic covered, teachers will find classroom-ready explanations and PowerPoint slides, as well as instructions and materials for in-class activities and take-home projects that will engage students. The book covers a wide variety of topics, including the “mega-preposition” en, the trilled r, the order of acquisition of consonants, por and para, the personal a, and the evolution of the Spanish verb system. The book is organized around a wide-ranging set of five linguistics-based essential questions that serve to contextualize the material: 1) How is Spanish different from other languages?, 2) How is Spanish similar to other languages?, 3) What are the roots of Spanish?, 4) How does Spanish vary?, 5) How do people learn and use Spanish? These questions are general enough for teachers of other languages to [End Page 154] easily apply them to their own target languages. The book’s introduction presents these essential questions as they apply to Spanish, and its five chapters take them up in turn. Each chapter covers several topics relevant to one of the essential questions. Crucially, the chapters provide instructors with everything they need to incorporate these topics into their teaching. Each chapter consists of an introduction and one or two major topics, each with sub-topics. For example, Chapter 1, titled “How is Spanish different from other languages?” has two major topics (“Spanish in the world” and “Language features”), and one of the sub-topics is “The variety of Spanish past tenses.” The presentation of each sub-topic begins with a brief explanation in English (“Just the facts”), which is followed by an even briefer one in simple Spanish (“Teacher talk”). These explanations are followed by detailed instructions for creative and engaging in-class activities and take-home projects that motivate, teach, reinforce, or explore the topic. Each chapter closes with a list of references. Three appendices list all in-class activities, take-home projects and slides. Each chapter has a corresponding PowerPoint presentation with slides in Spanish that are available online. The slides are an excellent complement to the explanations and activities in the book. They provide facts, examples, explanations, descriptions, word lists, sample data from research studies, quotations, and a wide range of attention-grabbing visuals, including pictures, maps, tables, diagrams and links to other images as well as articles and videos. Other slides contain instructions and supporting materials for the in-class activities and take-home projects. The material in both the chapter explanations and the slides is sure to give both students and teachers a sense of marvel at learning some of these facts for the first time. The book is full of eye-opening details, backed up by references, that even experienced linguists may not be fully aware of. Readers may even find themselves going through the contents as when reading a book from cover to cover, while consulting the slides as they read along. Reading this book is an enjoyable experience. The field of Hispanic linguistics, which serves as the basis for the book, sheds light on aspects of Spanish from phonology to grammar, from history to dialectology, and from acquisition to adult cognition. While teachers may have had some training in Hispanic linguistics, they may not necessarily know how best to apply it. This book bridges the gap between theory and practice with specific explanations, activities, assignments, and PowerPoint slides that Spanish teachers can use in their own classrooms, enabling them to enrich their practice with insights from this allied field. The linguistic insights from the book can contribute to add intellectual interest to the classroom by connecting Spanish to other languages, to general linguistic principles, and to other fields such as history...