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MAINTAINING A MINORITY LANGUAGE: A CASE STUDY OF HISPANIC TEENAGERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

Irma M. Olmedo
Irma M. Olmedo
Affiliation:
University of Illinois-Chicago
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Extract

Maintaining A Minority Language: A Case Study of Hispanic Teenagers. John Gibbons and Elizabeth Ramirez. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. x + 240. £25.95 paper.

On reading the title of this volume, the reader might assume that the study involves teenagers in a large urban area of the United States. Potential readers will be surprised to realize that this book is about Hispanic teenagers in Sydney, Australia, and the efforts of these teens and their families to maintain their Spanish language. The authors, Gibbons and Ramirez, argue that the understanding of minority language maintenance and shift “requires the examination of the degree of acquisition of various elements of proficiency, including spoken language, basic literacy skills, grammar and high register” (p. l). Thus, having set a rather rigorous benchmark for themselves, they proceed to study 106 Hispanic teenagers to determine the degree of maintenance of Spanish among them as well as their attitudes toward their bilingualism.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2006 , pp. 522 - 523
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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