Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York

by Ana Celia Zentella

This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the United States.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Teaching, Language

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the field of Spanish Sociolinguistics, this book made a giant contribution. I think it's unfortunate that it has a low rating here but I'm sure that's because people who have no exposure to linguistics were doing the ratings. Though this book is relevant to anyone interested in anthropology, language, educational policies, minority disenfranchisement, bilingual education, and the history of Puerto Ricans in the United States, it has a strong leaning towards linguistics. You should appreciate what it means that code switching (the use of two or more languages in a sentence, utterance, or conversation) is rule-governed and grammatically constrained. Through her extensive data analysis and ethnography of the Puerto Rican community in NYC, we see that ideologies have a lot to do with the perpetuation of the division and that much can be done to understand and change one of the most poverty-stricken communities in the United States. In spite of their hardships, they are a vibrant community with their own traditions, music, culture, and dialect (with just as much value and logic as any other dialect!!).

[Deborah Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough ethnography which highlights the wealth of knowledge that bilingual children have. A fundamental read for parents, teachers or anyone interested in bilingual education.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really thought it was fascinating, and awe-inspiring, how she recorded hours and hours of the girls' speech, and then transcribed their statements and coded them in Spanish (Standard or non) and English (Standard or non)... It was just a tremendous source of information. That being said, even I, a Spanish teacher interested in bilingual studies, found some parts to be tedious. The use of the 5 specific girls made it easy to follow and become invested in their story to see where they ended up.

[Araceli]

I like the book but it was a little hard to read because I went back a few times to re read it in order to understand what was happening. I recommend it, if you only like a lot of words in linguistics. this book is about a women who does a reseach in 5 puerto rican girls and how they became bilingual in New York el Barrio.

[lucien alexander “sasha” · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a class and found it enjoyable and illuminating. I love when ethnographers make their political intent clear. I don't know that I'd recommend this to anyone who's not into reading fairly technical academic writing for fun, but if that's your thing then Zentella does a fantastic job of painting a rich qualitative and quantitative portrait of children's language, and debunking the idea of 'Spanglish' speakers as 'confused' or 'alingual'.

[Bruce Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing deep ethnography and rhetorical/linguistic analysis.