Review of Montrul, S. (2013). Bilingüismo en El Mundo Hispanohablante

888 nonnative English speakers with different mother tongues. They communicate via writing or texting more often than by speaking. Often people use translation software or electronic dictionaries to translate the English texts they read or write, but the translations are frequently inaccurate. They may be close to the original meaning, or they may mistranslate it. In addition, beyond its linguistic structure, any written text is embedded with cultural expressions, local rhetoric, occupational discourse, and the author’s political stance. Both children and adults depend on reading and writing to learn, to communicate, to connect, and to function in this transnational and globalized economy. We read translated texts and news and we watch foreign movies with subtitles. The ways bilinguals and multilinguals read and write and how they read and write between languages is an important issue in today’s world. A chapter or two on this topic would have enriched this handbook. Another limitation of The Handbook is its English-centric perspective. Among 49 contributors, over two-thirds are from English-speaking countries, mostly scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States; the rest are from either Europe or formerly English-colonized countries. This decision by the editors not only indicates an English-centered perspective, but also a Eurocentric view on multilingualism. Most countries across the world, particularly those in Africa, Asia, and South America, are multilingual and have long histories of multilingualism. A handbook on multilingualism that does not include voices from the majority of the multilingual world presents not only its limitations in scope, but also limitations in perspective. This makes it questionable whether or not it can truly reflect the profound linguistic, cultural, and societal changes due to “globalization, transnational population flows, the spread of new technology and the changing political and economic landscape of different regions of the world” (p. 1). The limitation of the book reminds me of Elizabeth Bernhardt’s (2010) sharp criticism on the Anglophone view of multilingualism: “This multilingualism, that is English language monolingualism, is such a dominant dimension in the Anglophone world that it is often difficult to get even the most astute scholar to think about the world in ways other than with an Anglophone view” (p. 791). Makoni and Pennycook, the authors of Chapter 25, echo the same view by calling for “disinventing multilingualism” and for a move “from monological multilingualism to multilingual francas” (p. 439). I look forward to

The Modern Language Journal 98 (2014) reading a handbook on multilingualism that expands the discussion to include linguistics and literacy scholars from countries and regions across the world that do not have a close association with the English world and language in their long histories of multilingualism. Probably this is an unrealistic wish for a handbook on multilingualism publishing scholarly work written in English. REFERENCES BERNHARDT, E. B. (2000). Second-language reading as a case study of reading scholarship in the twentieth century. In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & B. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research 3 (pp. 791–811). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. DANLING FU University of Florida

MONTRUL, SILVINA. El Bilingu¨ismo en el Mundo Hispanohablante. Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell, 2012. Pp. xxii, 352. $51.95, paper. ISBN 978–0– 470–65721–8.

El Bilingu¨ismo en el Mundo Hispanohablante presents research on bilingualism from the perspective of Spanish and the Spanish-speaking world. The book is aimed at educators in the United States working with students learning Spanish as an L2 or a family language. Montrul argues that this group of language professionals and educators needs to understand the bilingual development of both groups of students. The author’s goal is to present this material in clear language that helps nonnative readers of Spanish understand concepts about bilingualism typically expressed in technical and advanced academic Spanish in research journals. Montrul’s double challenges are to deliver a book in Spanish that serves this diverse audience and with content sufficiently rich to represent a topic that is broader, both conceptually and geographically, than educators in the United States typically learn about. The book consists of thirteen chapters organized in three sections. Following the introductory chapter ¿Quie´n es Bilingu¨e? ‘Who is Bilingual?,’ Part 1, Bilingu¨ismo y Sociedad ‘Bilingualism and Society,’ begins with a discussion of social aspects of bilingualism, with subsequent chapters devoted

Reviews to Spain, Latin America, and the United States. This same organization is repeated in Part 3, Polı´tica y Educacio´n ‘Politics and Education,’ in which an introduction to bilingual educational concepts (Chapter 10) is followed by chapters on bilingual education in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Sandwiched in between is Part 2, El Bilingu¨ismo Individual ‘The Bilingual Individual,’ consisting of chapters on psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism, child language acquisition, second language acquisition, and language shift and incomplete first language acquisition. The range of chapters is appropriately broad, covering social, cognitive/linguistic, and educational aspects of bilingualism. Chapters average 20–30 pages in length, including supporting materials at the end of each chapter: key words, comprehension questions, and application exercises. Four chapters (5, 11, 12, 13) include discussion questions and all but two feature topics for research. In terms of geographic coverage, the author sets the worthwhile goal of familiarizing educators in the United States with research on Spanish and bilingualism in Europe and Latin America. In this way, the book provides an ideal complement and background to recent volumes on Spanish in English-speaking contexts (Potowski & Rothman, 2012) and on varieties of Spanish used by Latinos in the United States. Coverage of Spanishspeaking communities in Spain and Latin America is balanced. One notable exception is the lack of attention to Spanish and bilingualism along the United States–Mexico border. This is most evident in Chapter 5, El Espan˜ol en los Estados Unidos ‘Spanish in the United States,’ which makes only two references to bilingualism research in this region. Greater inclusion of research from the Borderlands would have enriched the discussion of topics such as codeswitching, Spanglish, and diglossia. The book is intended as a course text for university classes, but little guidance is provided on how to use the end-of-chapter questions and activities. A separate reference section for each chapter is a welcome feature for course instructors who wish to assign chapters or sections. The key terms are especially helpful for reinforcing academic concepts in Spanish that readers may be encountering for the first time in any language. A criticism of the topics for research and of the exercises, generally, is that they rely heavily on online resources and provide few opportunities for readers to make connections to the communities where they live and will presumably practice. Similarly, few of the more cognitively

889 oriented chapters suggest research topics, which seems to be a lost opportunity for readers and students to collect and analyze informal data as a means of understanding the theories presented in these chapters. Overall, the book is well indexed, with separate topic and author indices that will be appreciated by scholars and students alike. It includes a wealth of tables and figures that are evenly distributed across the chapters, as well as maps (concentrated in Chapters 3–5) to support the book’s geographic organization. Conceptually, a strength of the book is that it attempts to frame bilingualism as a phenomenon that is inherently cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and political in nature. For the most part, Montrul’s account of bilingualism in Spanishspeaking communities delivers on this ambitious premise. Given the scope of the book and the emphasis on bilingualism and bilingual education in Spain, Latin America, and the United States, inevitably some topics are covered in greater detail than others. The chapters that summarize the greatest number of studies and include the most recent research are, perhaps understandably, those closest to the author’s own area of research on incomplete language acquisition by bilinguals. Overall, the cognitive and linguistic foci receive somewhat greater emphasis. For example, despite impressive historical depth in sections dealing with language policy, the phenomenon of language contact is presented largely as a matter of structural change in the code, and contact between languages is presented in terms of interference in the Spanish of bilingual speakers rather than as cross-linguistic influence affecting the bilingual speaker’s full linguistic repertoire. Similarly, the topic of literacy, arguably worthy of a separate chapter given the potential importance of reading and writing in bilingual education programs, receives little attention, and only in the context of education. Likewise, a concluding chapter looking ahead at the future of bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world would have been a welcome addition. Despite these limitations, the book makes an important contribution to the field. The focus on Spanish bilingualism for educators in the United States is timely and the author clearly meets the challenge of providing a comprehensive, well written, and accessible text for readers with varying levels of experience and proficiency of reading in Spanish. In using selected chapters with native speakers of Spanish, heritage speakers, and advanced L2 readers of Spanish whose formal background in linguistics and bilingualism varied

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considerably, I found that the academic discourse in this text, with support from the instructor, is appropriately challenging. Although I have yet to use the entire book as a course text, I would do so happily. PATRICK H. SMITH The University of Texas at El Paso

CHINESE

DUFF, PATRICIA, TIM ANDERSON, ROMA ILNYCKYJ, ELLA VANGAYA, RACHEL TIANXUAN WANG, & ELLIOTT YATES. Learning Chinese: Linguistic, Sociocultural and Narrative Perspectives. Berlin, Germany and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2013. Pp. xv, 332. $98.00, cloth. ISBN 978–1–934078–76–1.

Learning Chinese is the inaugural project of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education (CRCLLE), established at the University of British Columbia in 2008. To this reviewer, it is an important scholarly contribution to the field of what Patsy Duff and her co-authors dub Chinese as an additional language (CAL, not to be confused with the Center for Applied Linguistics). As they state in the introductory chapter to this volume, “few studies of CAL have provided an in-depth and contextualized analysis of individual learners’ motivations and goals for choosing to study Chinese, their experiences and milestones in Chinese language and literacy acquisition . . . and their longer-term trajectories as Chinese learners and users” (p. 13). The depth of that analysis comes in large part because the subjects of the study are the authors themselves: They are the ones learning Chinese. Learning Chinese is at once a work of qualitative research of the highest caliber—hardly surprising, given the scholarly reputation of its leading author—yet with enough elements of numerical data to satisfy quantitatively inclined readers. Duff and her colleagues are to be commended for adopting a research framework with two traditional methodologies—linguistic and sociocultural—with a third framework less often seen in second and foreign language acquisition research— metanarrative. Chapter 1 provides a conceptual overview of the context within which this project has been undertaken; to wit, that of China Rising, in a

variety of public settings, such as portrayals in the media, politics (including cultural), and the underlying pragmatic curricular issues of learning and teaching Chinese. The authors concisely but comprehensively review the existing research, including the relative handful of case studies comparable to the present one, and pay proper attention to the current and increasing impact of heritage learners. The chapter concludes by laying out the research design for this study. Chapter 2 is the first of two chapters to focus on the linguistic elements in the author–students’ progress toward proficiency. After providing thumbnail profiles of their respective learning careers, Duff and her collaborators describe the various assessment tools and scales available, ultimately settling on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), supplemented by self-assessments and interviews, the latter of which serve as the basis of the metanarratives. Although the challenges to these learners are nothing new (e.g., dialects, tones), what is new is the use of transcripts of speech samples that are made by the author–students themselves. Quantitative data analyses include a focus on lexical variety and fluency, whereas the qualitative analyses center on grammatical variety. There is as well analysis of morphemes of various sorts, most of which have been and will doubtless remain repeated objects of scholarship (e.g., ba, bei, directional verbs, and verbs of motion) in the CAL field. The focus shifts in Chapter 3 to the written language and developing everyday Chinese literacies. As such, the chapter serves as an effective transition to the focus in Chapter 4 on sociocultural research methodology. Duff et al. characterize literacy as “mediated social practice,” with a “focus not only on cognitive processes . . . but also the various social contexts and purposes for which [learners] willingly engage with texts of very different types, especially outside of school” (p. 85). It is intriguing to note that the authors have chosen to include portions of the previously mentioned transcripts that they have recorded in handwritten, not word processed, Chinese characters. In an age when our definition of what it means to be literate in written Chinese (cf. Walker’s 1984 discussion of the reading and literacy) has been called into question with every codeswitching text message our fledgling students send, the implications for both learning and teaching CAL are considerable. Chapter 4 focuses on a sociocultural analysis of the author–learners. It is a conceptually rich