This book offers a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of current research on the diverse varieties of Spanish spoken in the United States. It explores linguistic features, cultural influences, and the evolution of these dialects, making it an essential resource for understanding the complexities of Spanish in a multicultural context.
Focusing on the experiences of students in a pioneering Spanish-English dual immersion school in Chicago, the narrative chronicles their journey over two school years. It highlights their use of Spanish and English, exploring how these languages shape their identities and intersect in their daily lives. The author provides a unique insight into the challenges and triumphs faced by the students as they navigate their bilingual education and cultural identity.
The Conversaciones escritas: Lectura y redacción en contexto Workbook, 2nd Edition features additional practice exercises to help students build on the foundation they learn from their text, Conversaciones escritas: Lectura y redacción en contexto, 2nd Edition.
Focusing on a pioneering Spanish-English dual immersion school in Chicago, the narrative chronicles the journeys of students over two school years. It highlights their experiences with language use and proficiency while exploring how bilingualism shapes their identities. The author delves into the intersection of language and identity, providing insights into the challenges and triumphs faced by the students as they navigate their dual linguistic environment.
"Spanish in Chicago is the first book-length study of Spanish in Chicago, a site where Spanish is a minority language in contact with dominant English. The book's goal is to describe the oral Spanish of Chicago based Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and MexiRicans across three generations and identify patterns of change and propose explanations for them. It describes what happens when speakers who use different varieties of Spanish come into contact with each other in Chicago. The study contributes to discussions of possible language or dialect contact outcomes such as linguistic convergence, dialect leveling, accommodation, and language loss. The book starts with an introduction to the history of the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in Chicago, including histories of settlement, shifting demographics, contact and engagement, and mutual social and linguistic attitudes. It features an analysis of five linguistic features: lexical familiarity, proportional use of "so" vs "entonces", number of codeswitches and percent English use, production of subjunctive morphology in obligatory and variable contexts, and two phonological features, the weakening of coda /s/ and the velarization of /r/. The analyses consider the role of proficiency and generation in the production of all five of these features. The book then offers an extensive discussion of the factors that underlie the development of diverse Spanish proficiency levels within Latino Chicago and offers suggestions on how to promote Spanish language vitality across generations in the future. The book's findings are compared to other foundational studies of Spanish in the US"-- Provided by publisher